A Method to Construct Plasma with Nonlinear Density Enhancement Effect in Multiple Internal Inductively Coupled Plasmas

Abstract

A method is proposed to built up plasma based on a nonlinear enhancement phenomenon of plasma density with discharge by multiple internal antennas simultaneously. It turns out that the plasma density under multiple sources is higher than the linear summation of the density under each source. This effect is helpful to reduce the fast exponential decay of plasma density in single internal inductively coupled plasma source and generating a larger-area plasma with multiple internal inductively coupled plasma sources. After a careful study on the balance between the enhancement and the decay of plasma density in experiments, a plasma is built up by four sources, which proves the feasibility of this method. According to the method, more sources and more intensive enhancement effect can be employed to further build up a high-density, large-area plasma for different applications.

Plasma characteristics of direct current enhanced cylindrical inductively coupled plasma source

“…This phenomenon can be attributed to the nonlinear enhancement effect between DC discharge and RF discharge. The similar nonlinear enhancement effect has been proved by Chen et al [21,40] with discharge of multiple cylindrical ICP sources.…”