Importance of physical units in the Boltzmann plot method

Abstract

The Boltzmann plot is one of the most widely used methods for determining the temperature in different types of laboratory plasmas. It operates on the logarithm as a function of the dimensional argument, which assumes that the correct physical units are used. In many works using the Boltzmann method, there is no analysis of the dimension of this argument, which may be the cause of a potential error. This technical note offers a brief description of the method and shows how to correctly use physical units when using transcendental functions like the logarithm.