Penning ionization

Penning started to work at the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium at Eindhoven to continue the investigation of electric discharge on rare gases.

that would appear to be required for charge conservation is omitted, because S is a macroscopic surface and the loss of one electron has a negligible effect.

It enables the study of local electron distribution of individual molecular orbitals, which exposes to the outside of the outermost surface layers.

Glow discharge mass spectrometry is the direct determination of trace element in solid samples.

Processes inherent to the glow discharge, namely cathodic sputtering coupled with Penning ionization, yield an ion population from which semi-quantitative results can be directly obtained.