Investigation of the effects of excited states in low-pressure inductively coupled argon plasmas using a self-consistent kinetic model*

Low-pressure radio-frequency (RF) inductively coupled plasmas (ICPs) are extensively used for materials processing. In this work, we have developed a self-consistent kinetic model consisting of two-dimensional Maxwell equations, zero-dimensional electron Boltzmann equation, and global model. The kinetic model presented in this work is modified based on our previous model. The simulation results obtained by the improved model achieve a better agreement with the experiments. This work presents an investigation of the influence of excited states on normalized EEPF, plasma density, effective electron temperature as well as reaction dynamics in a low-pressure RF Ar ICP using the kinetic model. The excited states include 1s (metastable and resonant) and 2p states, due to these species presenting the highest number-density in low pressure discharges. The effect of higher excitation energy levels has been neglected. The developed kinetic model can be extended to more complex gas discharges, i.e., molecular gases, and to ultimately optimize the parameters of RF ICP sources used for industrial application.