A Simulation Study of the Factors Affecting the Collisional Power Dissipation in a Helicon Plasma

Effects of magnetic field on electron power absorption in helicon fluid simulation

“…Helicon plasmas mainly exhibit two coupling modes, electromagnetic and electrostatic. Electromagnetic modes are weakly damped and called helicon waves, whereas electrostatic modes are strongly damped and called Trivelpiece-Gould (T-G) waves [10][11][12]. Chen pointed out that the Landau damping mechanism played an important role in helicon discharges [13]; this was also verified experimentally [14].…”

“…Adopting the ambipolar diffusion approximation to parallel fluxes, equation (10) becomes p tot is the electron power absorption, given as follows:…”

“…It is important to study wave propagation and absorption, as well as power deposition. CST [10], HELIC [17], MAXEB [11], ANTENA2 [22], SPIREs [23], and ADAMANT [24] were developed to study the ionization mechanism.…”

“…Many helicon devices operate at low pressure (∼0.5 Pa), strong magnetic field (∼1 kG), and high power (∼kW), as shown in table 1. To date, numerical simulation studies focused only on wave propagation and power deposition, whereas ionization and transport processes have usually been neglected [10,17,[22][23][24]. To the best of our knowledge, simulations with a background magnetic field over 500 G and a pressure less than 1 Pa in the same time, including power deposition, transport processes, and ionization processes, have not been reported, although these parameters can be realized experimentally.…”