Characteristics of temporal evolution of particle density and electron temperature in helicon discharge

Abstract

On the basis of considering electrochemical reactions and collision relations in detail, a direct numerical simulation model of a helicon plasma discharge with three-dimensional two-fluid equations was employed to study the characteristics of the temporal evolution of particle density and electron temperature. With the assumption of weak ionization, the Maxwell equations coupled with the plasma parameters were directly solved in the whole computational domain. All of the partial differential equations were solved by the finite element solver in COMSOL MultiphysicsTM with a fully coupled method. In this work, the numerical cases were calculated with an Ar working medium and a Shoji-type antenna. The numerical results indicate that there exist two distinct modes of temporal evolution of the electron and ground atom density, which can be explained by the ion pumping effect. The evolution of the electron temperature is controlled by two schemes: electromagnetic wave heating and particle collision cooling. The high RF power results in a high peak electron temperature while the high gas pressure leads to a low steady temperature. In addition, an OES experiment using nine Ar I lines was conducted using a modified CR model to verify the validity of the results by simulation, showing that the trends of temporal evolution of electron density and temperature are well consistent with the numerically simulated ones.