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 O${}_2$(a${}^1{\Delta }_{\mathrm{g}}$) 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 $\alpha -$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 $\alpha -$mode electron heating is observed for a surface quenching coefficient of 0.001 or smaller.

arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.09748