Main Features of the Electron Kinetics in Collision Dominated Steady‐State rf Plasmas

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reports about systematic investigations of the velocity distribution function and resulting macroscopic quantities of the electrons in a weakly ionized and spatially homogeneous rf plasma in the molecular gas H2 and about a comparison with an analogous study of the rf plasma in the inert gas Ne for a wide field frequency range. These results are obtained by a strict treatment of the non‐stationary electron Boltzmann equation considering the action of the rf field as well as that of elastic and inelastic electron ‐ neutral gas particle collision processes. Furthermore, such investigations could be extended to very high field frequencies for the rf plasma in neon. This provides the basis for a general characterization of the complex temporal behaviour of the isotropic and anisotropic part of the velocity distribution as well as of the several macroscopic quantities in the range from low to very high field frequencies. The ration of the field frequency to two dissipation frequencies which describe the lumped dissipation of energy and impulse due to elastic and all inelastic collision processes and which are only determined by the atomic data of these processes governs the temporal behaviour of the electron kinetics in the rf plasma in any gas.