Kinetic self-consistent simulations of electromagnetic effects in CCP plasmas with a 2D darwin PIC/MCC code

With increase of the discharge size and driving frequencies of the capacitively coupled plasmas used in the plasma processing, electromagnetic effects can start to play a significant role in determining plasma homogeneity, a vital property in industrial production. The low plasma pressure normally used in CCPs demands use of the kinetic description for the plasma dynamics, however, such a kinetic treatment has been absent so far from the literature. We propose a use of an implicit Darwin electromagnetic particle-in-cell code enhanced by Monte-Carlo collisions for self-consistent kinetic simulating of the phenomena in large scale discharges driven by high frequencies. The use of Darwin approximation enables one to straightforwardly implement external network boundary conditions, which would have been much more complicated in a fully electromagnetic code. The code is parallelized on graphical processing units (GPU), which significantly reduces its execution time. The simulation results demonstrate inhomogeneous power deposition under certain conditions in agreement with the corresponding theory.