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P: Plasmaphysik

P 11: Niedertemperaturplasmen / Plasmatechnologie 5

P 11.3: Talk

Saturday, March 5, 2005, 11:45–12:00, HU 3038

Study of neutral loop discharge (NLD) plasma via PIC simulation — •Murat Vural and Ralf Peter Brinkmann — Ruhr-Universität-Bochum, Lehrstuhl für Theoretische Elektrotechnik, D-44780 Bochum

Electron heating, i.e. the conversion of directed field energy into thermal electron energy, requires a randomization process which destroys the coherence in the motion of the electrons accelerated by the field. The standard Ohmic heating, i.e. the scattering of electrons at the neutrals of the background becomes very inefficient at gas pressures below 1 Pa. The NLD is based on an alternative mechanism of power absorption that is effective in low pressure region. We consider a simple but realistic model of a stationary non-uniform and rotational invariant magnetic field configuration with neutral loop. In the neighborhood of neutral points (where the magnetic field vanishes), however, the adiabatic invariance of the magnetic moment µ is destroyed and thus the electron motion becomes strongly chaotic and effective heating occurs. In this work, particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation results of NLD plasmas are presented. The NLD plasma is generated by applying an rf electric field parallel to direction along the magnetic neutral loop (p-NLD) and vertical to direction across the magnetic neutral loop (v-NLD). For this study, we use a modified two-dimensional PIC code XOOPIC, which is time explicit and fully electromagnetic. This code is used to investigate spatially and temporally resolved simulation results of the electron/ion density and electron energy distribution for different external magnetic fields and plasma parameters.