Surface effects in a capacitive argon discharge in the intermediate pressure regime

One-dimensional particle-in-cell/Monte Carlo collisional simulations are performed on a capacitive 2.54 cm gap, 1.6 Torr argon discharge driven by a sinusoidal rf current density amplitude of 50 A m −2 at 13.56 MHz. The excited argon states (metastable levels, resonance levels, and the 4p manifold) are modeled self-consistently with the particle dynamics as space- and time-varying fluids. Four cases are examined, including and neglecting excited states, and using either a fixed or energy-dependent secondary electron emission yield due to ion and/or neutral impact on the electrodes. The results for all cases show that most of the ionization occurs near the plasma-sheath interfaces, with little ionization within the plasma bulk region. Without excited states, secondary electrons emitted from the electrodes are found to play a strong role in the ionization process. When the excited states, and secondary electron emission due to neutral and ion impact on the electrodes are included in the discharge model, the discharge operation transitions from α-mode to γ-mode, in which nearly all the ionization is due to secondary electrons. Secondary electron production due to the bombardment of excited argon atoms was approximately14.7 times greater than that due to ion bombardment. Electron impact of ground state argon atoms by secondary electrons contributes about 76% of the total ionization; primary electrons, about 11%; metastable Penning ionization, about 13%; and multi-step ionization, about 0.3%.