Particle-in-Cell Simulation of Plasma Sheath Dynamics With Kinetic Ions

Abstract

An electrostatic particle-in-cell simulation code is developed to investigate the interaction between plasma and material surfaces in the presence of secondary electron emission. Kinetic ions are included into the numerical simulation to incorporate the process of ion bombardment on the material surfaces. The influences of the secondary electron emission on sheath dynamics are further investigated, which is induced by ions on top of electrons.Index Terms-Kinetic ions, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation, plasma-material surface interaction, secondary electron emission.

Strongly Emitting Surfaces Unable to Float below Plasma Potential

“…Recent theory [10] and simulation [11,12,13] studies have demonstrated a second solution type. In the "inverse regime" the sheath potential is positive, opposite in sign from the SCL.…”

Development of Particle-in-Cell Simulation in a Two Dimensional Trench Geometry

“…In the numerical simulation we incorporate both the electron and an ion species. We extend our previous work in [10] from one dimension to two dimension.…”

“…We employ the MKS unit in this paper. As in [10], after normalizing length by Debye length, time by the inverse of plasma frequency [11], and the electrostatic potential by T e /e, the equations of motion are given by…”

“…1. In initiating the PIC simulation, we employ Gaussian for the velocity distribution for both v x and v y (see [10] for methods to produce Gaussian):…”

Beat Frequency and Velocity Variation of Ions in a Magnetized Plasma Sheath for Different Obliqueness of the Magnetic Field

“…The correlative works, both of experiment and theory have been developed widely during the past several years and not yet fully understood (Chodura 1982, 1986, Riemann 1991, 2000, Hatami et al 2008, Zou et al 2009, Chalise & Khanal 2012, Khoramabadi et al 2011, Gyergyek & Kovacic 2015. The sheath formed between magnetic plasma and a particle absorbing wall have received considerable amount of attention (Hatami et al 2008, Zou et al 2009, Chalise & Khanal 2012, Khoramabadi et al 2011, Gyergyek & Kovacic 2015, Huang et al 2015, Moulik & Goswami 2015, Chalise & Khanal 2015, Liberman et al 2016, Chauhan et al 2016. When the plasma is confined in any closed surface, the plasma interacts with the material surface so that the proper understanding of this interaction is very important in all plasma applications like in plasma confinement for fusion, sputtering, etching, surface treatment, etc (Chalise & Khanal 2012).…”