“…These discharges are used for steel surface nitriding [1], thin-film deposition [2,3], plasma assisted pulsed laser deposition [4], metal surface cleaning [5] and, more recently, in bacterial sterilization [6,7]. Accordingly, a large number of both experimental [8][9][10][11][12][13] and theoretical [14][15][16] works have appeared in the literature with the aim of getting a deeper insight into the understanding of the kinetics of long-lived species in these non-equilibrium media: vibrationally excited ground-electronic state N 2 (X 1 + g , v) and metastable N 2 (A 3 + u ) molecules, and ground-state N( 4 S) and metastable N( 2 D, 2 P) atoms. Once these species are created in the discharge region of a flowing N 2 microwave [14][15][16] or dc discharge [17], they may be either carried out to the postdischarge or created again in the post-discharge, as a result of a complex interplay kinetics involving other species.…”