Study and Investigation of the Plasma Behavior in a Radio-Frequency Plasma Discharge

Abstract

A Particle-In-Cell with Monte Carlo collision• (PIC-MCC) simulation is used to model the plasma generated in a parallel plate radio-frequency (RF) capacitively coupled discharge in argon at low pressure.

The boundary conditions include surface charge on the electrodes, which are connected to a series RLC circuit with driving term V(t), and the electric field and particle motion are obtained by finite difference methods leading to the self-consistent• creation of sheaths on the boundaries.

The collisions included in the simulation are those between charged particles and neutral background gas atoms, other interactions are neglected at low pressure.

Electric field, electron density, total charge density and the electron energy distribution junction (The EEDF) profiles obtained from this simulation were found to be in good agreement with those obtained from other simulations using continuum models