The role of surface quenching of the singlet delta molecule in a capacitively coupled oxygen discharge
Abstract
We use the one-dimensional object-oriented particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision code oopd1 to explore the influence of the surface quenching of the singlet delta metastable molecule O2(a1 g) on the electron heating mechanism, and the electron energy probability function (EEPF), in a single frequency capacitively coupled oxygen discharge. When operating at low pressure (10 mTorr) varying the surface quenching coefficient in the range 0.00001 -- 0.1 has no influence on the electron heating mechanism and electron heating is dominated by drift-ambipolar (DA) heating in the plasma bulk and electron cooling is observed in the sheath regions. As the pressure is increased to 25 mTorr the electron heating becomes a combination of DA-mode and α-mode heating, and the role of the DA-mode decreases with decreasing surface quenching coefficient. At 50 mTorr electron heating in the sheath region dominates. However, for the highest quenching coefficient there is some contribution from the DA-mode in the plasma bulk, but this contribution decreases to almost zero and pure α-mode electron heating is observed for a surface quenching coefficient of 0.001 or smaller.
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