Benchmark continuum and kinetic simulations of argon microplasmas in the direct current and microwave regimes

Abstract

This study presents benchmark comparisons between continuum and kinetic simulations of argon microplasmas operating in the direct current and microwave regimes. Kinetic simulations using the particle-in-cell with Monte Carlo collisions (PIC-MCC) method and continuum simulations using the full-momentum equation for both ions and electrons are performed at various operating conditions in order to study the influence of product of pressure and gap size, pd (for a given gap size), influence of gap size (for a given value of pd) and operating frequency. It is shown that using the electron energy distribution function (EEDF) predicted by zero-dimensional Boltzmann solvers (such as BOLSIG+) in continuum simulations of direct current microplasmas leads to a significant under-prediction of plasma number densities with continuum simulations based on the Maxwellian EEDF performing better particularly for higher values of pd. The discrepancy between kinetic and continuum simulations is attributed to the presence of hot electrons created as a result of secondary emission and subsequent acceleration in the sheath. On the other hand, simulations performed for argon microwave microplasmas operating at 0.5 GHz, 0.8 GHz, 2 GHz and 4 GHz demonstrated that continuum simulations performed using the rate constants from BOLSIG+ showed excellent agreement with kinetic simulations for the plasma density profiles in spite of over-predicting the voltage/power required to achieve a given plasma density.