Numerical study of argon ions transported across the sheath in electron cyclotron resonance discharges

Abstract

The transport of argon ions through the sheath as well as through the neutral region in electron cyclotron resonance discharges in argon gas is studied by means of Monte Carlo simulation, with the emphasis on the sheath potential and the characteristics of argon ions in the sheath. The evolution of the energy, velocity, and angle distributions of the ions in the sheath and the dependence of the distributions on gas pressure and substrate bias are investigated primarily concerned with collisional sheath. It is found that the effect of the pressure on the ion behavior in the sheath is not the same as in the neutral region, however, the substrate bias greatly influences the ion behavior mainly due to ion-neutral elastic collisions within the sheath. Our results also show that the ion motion in crossing the sheath tends to be parallel to the applied magnetic field, and an ion flux with good directionality can be expected by imposing on a negative voltage substrate.

Customizing electron confinement in plasma-assembled Si/AlN nanodots for solar cell applications

“…Size-uniform Si NDs on an AlN buffer layer have been synthesized by means of the low-frequency inductively coupled plasma ͑ICP͒ assisted magnetron sputtering deposition. [17][18][19][20][21] The buffer layer made of the X-V compound AlN has been chosen because of its many merits such as a very high dielectric constant ͑8.5͒, excellent thermal conductivity ͑3.2 W/cm K͒, and high refractive index ͑2.15͒. [22][23][24] In addition, AlN has a hexagonal wurtzite crystal structure and its lattice constants, a and c, are 3.112 and 4.982 Å, respectively.…”

Ion current distribution during deposition of dielectric material using an insulating porous alumina template

“…Many conventional deposition techniques, including plasma-enhanced chemical-vapour deposition (PECVD), can be used to fabricate nanodots via the porous alumina template [14][15][16][17][18]. A numerical simulation technique is used to simulate the deposition processes: pulsed laser deposition [19,20], deposition in the magnetron sputtering discharge [21,22], chemical vapour deposition [23], and so on [24,25]. Modelling and numerical simulations of plasma processing are useful in many ways and they could be used to optimize manufacturing processes within the framework of the existing processing systems [26].…”

Ion distribution functions in an Ar-Cl ECR discharge

“…There have been a number of previous studies, both experimental [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and theoretical [10][11][12][13][14][15], of the ion velocity distribution in processing plasmas. Matsuoka and Ono [2] studied the ion distribution functions at the substrate in an argon ECR plasma over a range of parameters.…”

“…Liu et al [12] and Wu et al [13] used twodimensional models with particle ions and fluid electrons. Zhong et al [14,15] used an assumed ion distribution to determine the properties of the plasma outside the sheath, and then used a Monte Carlo technique to track ion trajectories through the potential structure. We believe that the present paper is the first fully self-consistent 2D kinetic simulation which includes all of the relevant collision processes.…”