Analysis of Local and Nonlocal Electron Kinetics Through Energy Relaxation Process in a Capacitive RF Plasma

The relation between the electron energy distribution function and the energy loss mechanism has been verified through simulations and experiments by changing the electrode gap distance and the gas pressure [1] . The energy relaxation time and mean free path show fully kinetic description of electron transport and collisions in a capacitively coupled plasma device [2] . A two-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulation with Monte Carlo collision (MCC) enables to calculate the energy relaxation mean free path before and after ionization collisions. The spatial distributions of the energy relaxation length and the ionization collision rate were compared for argon RF capacitively coupled plasmas with the variations of gas pressure and geometry. With a two-dimensional analysis, we observed significant mechanism for the transition of electron kinetics related to the ratio of the energy relaxation mean free path and ionization rate and its spatial distributions.