Kinetic investigation of the planar multipole resonance probe under arbitrary pressure

Abstract

A new plasma diagnostic tool called planar multipole resonance probe (pMRP) has been proposed in the past decade. It has a minimally invasive structure and allows simultaneous measurement of electron density, temperature, and collision frequency. Previous work has investigated the behavior of the pRMP by the Drude model, which misses kinetic effects, and the collisionless kinetic model, which misses collisional damping. To further study the pMRP at arbitrary pressure, a collisional kinetic model is proposed in this paper. The electron dynamics is described by the kinetic equation, which considers the electron-neutral elastic collision. Under the electrostatic approximation, the kinetic equation is coupled to the Poisson equation. The real part of the general complex admittance is calculated to describe the spectral response of the probe–plasma system. The calculated spectra of the idealized pMRP demonstrate that this collisional kinetic model can capture both collisionless kinetic damping and collisional damping. This model overcomes the limitations of the Drude model and the collisionless kinetic model and allows discussion of the validity of simpler models.