Kinetic phenomena in electron transport in radio-frequency fields

Abstract We discuss the application of swarm physics based techniques to study the time resolved kinetic phenomena that may be of interest to modeling of radio-frequency (rf) plasma, the relevance of such studies for the data that are being used and models that are being developed. Kinetic phenomena may not be predicted by extrapolation of the dc data or single particle trajectories and require full kinetic treatment or detailed simulations. Our exact solutions to the Boltzmann equation by direct numerical procedure (DNP) and Monte Carlo simulations (MCSs) revealed such phenomena as: anomalous longitudinal diffusion, time resolved negative differential conductivity, absolute negative mobility in afterglow and in rf fields, complex waveforms of transport coefficients due to phases between electric and magnetic fields, due to cyclotronic motion and all the comparisons performed so far between the two techniques and with results of the exact solutions to the Boltzmann equation by the group from James Cook University have showed excellent agreement. While the data used nowadays in plasma modeling are basically for dc fields, one has to include effects due to magnetic and time resolved magnetic field and also the kinetic phenomena in plasma modeling as these may affect the electron transport in real collisional processing plasmas. Thus we believe that kinetic and Monte Carlo based codes should be tested against swarm transport benchmarks, including results for time resolved E ( t ) and E ( t )× B ( t ) fields.