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We present the results of a study of a capacitively coupled hydrogen discharge by means of a one-dimensional numerical fluid model and experiments. The model includes a detailed description of the gas-phase chemistry taking into account the production of H− ions by dissociative attachment of H2 vibrational levels. The population of these levels is described by a Boltzmann vibrational distribution function characterized by a vibrational temperature TV. The effect of the dissociative-attachment reaction on the discharge dynamics was investigated by varying the vibrational temperature, which was used as a model input parameter. Increasing the vibrational temperature from 1000 to 6000 K affects both the chemistry and the dynamics of the electrical discharge. Because of dissociative attachment, the H− ion density increases by seven orders of magnitude and the H− ion density to electron density ratio varies from 10−7 to 6, while the positive ion density increases slightly. As a consequence, the atomic hydrogen density increases by a factor of three, and the sheath voltage drops from 95 to 75 V. Therefore, clear evidence of a strong coupling between chemistry and electrical dynamics through the production of H− ions is demonstrated. Moreover, satisfactory agreement between computed and measured values of atomic hydrogen and H− ion densities gives further support to the requirement of a detailed description of the hydrogen vibrational kinetics for capacitively coupled radio frequency discharge models in the Torr regime.

In the field of plasma deposition of amorphous and microcrystalline silicon, the increase of the excitation frequency has often been considered as a way to enhance the deposition rate. Moreover, the increase of pressure has also been shown to enhance the deposition rate and improve the film properties. We attempt to clarify the effects of frequency in the 13.56–40.68 MHz range and to compare them to those of the pressure in the range of 0.5–1.5 Torr. For that purpose we use a numerical modeling of capacitively coupled hydrogen plasma, particularly relevant for the deposition of microcrystalline silicon. We use a one-dimensional time-dependent fluid model for the description of neutrals, positive and negative ions, and electrons, which involves a chemistry model taking into account 32 reactions in the gas phase and on the surface of the electrodes. The results of the model for the symmetrical system show that both pressure and frequency have pronounced influence on the parameters of the discharge: sheath thickness, ratio between power transferred to ions and electrons, and concentration and flux of atomic hydrogen at the electrode surface. We found that increasing the excitation frequency, while keeping constant the power dissipated in the plasma, leads to a more moderate increase of electron density as compared with the case of constant rf-voltage amplitude. The analysis of this phenomenon reveals that, with increase of frequency, the power coupling to the electrons becomes more efficient due to the decrease of the phase shift between voltage and current for both constant power and constant voltage conditions. There is, in addition, a significant drop of the sheath voltage with frequency when the power dissipated in the plasma is kept constant. This leads to the reduction in the drift loss rate for charged species. The increase of pressure mainly reduces the diffusive component of the loss rate for both charged and neutral species and, as a result, electron density enhancement is less pronounced. The increase of pressure leads to a more uniform spatial dissipation of the power coupled to the plasma, whereas the increase in frequency results in a higher amount of power dissipated on the plasma-sheath boundaries due to the decrease of the sheath width.

Threshold ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) has been used to measure the excited molecular oxygen states O2 (1Δg) and during plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition of tin oxide (SnO2) thin films. The latter, composed of nanosized features, was deposited by feeding in a mixture of Ar, O2 and tetramethyltin (Sn(CH3)4 or TMT) in a capacitively coupled RF discharge reactor. Langmuir probe measurements were performed along with TIMS to measure the electron temperature and density. The correlations between these two diagnostic methods have been investigated. The observed densities of O2 (1Δg) and in the γ mode of the discharge are maximum at a low electron temperature and high density. Furthermore, these results have been shown to be correlated to the trend of the electronic conductivity of the deposited SnO2 thin films.