Recently, experimental electron impact widths and ion broadening parameters of isolated Kr I lines were reported. In addition, the contribution of Kr II and Kr III ion dynamics to Kr I line widths is determined. Here, on the basis of the critical evaluation of the plasma source, the deconvolution procedure and earlier results by the same authors, possible causes for erroneous line shape recordings and their interpretation, are discussed. To demonstrate the experimental difficulties in the procedure used for Stark broadening parameter measurements, an additional experiment is performed and profiles of plasmabroadened lines are generated. All our new results and the analysis of the plasma source, experimental procedure and reported data of Kr I lines indicate that certain aspects of earlier work need further investigation.
IntroductionRecently, a new technique was proposed for simultaneous determination of the electron impact Stark width, w e , ion broadening parameter, A, and ion dynamic contribution D, to the line width and used to study more than 70 lines of He I [1-3], Ne I [4], Ar I [4, 5] and Kr I [4, 6] with a respectable estimated accuracy of 15%. The authors [1-6] used their six free parameters deconvolution (SFPD) procedure [7-9] to determine plasma and line parameters including w e , A and D. A comparison between experimental [5] and theoretical A results [10] for Ne I and Ar I lines shows systematically larger (up to a factor 15 for Ne I) experimental A values. The aim of this work is to evaluate this newly proposed technique [1-7] for simultaneous determination of w e , A and D of the plasma broadened atomic line. For this purpose the proposed deconvolution technique, plasma source and experimental procedure [1-7] will be