Collisionless electron heating in a surface-wave discharge

Summary form only given. A surface-wave (SW) plasma is generated by absorption of the microwave energy from a wave propagating between a plasma with overcritical density and a dielectric surface. SW discharge plasmas have been thoroughly described and studied both experimentally and theoretically or numerically, but some aspects of the mechanisms of electron energy absorption at low pressure are still not fully understood or at least not satisfactorily predicted or described by the models.In this paper, we describe for the first time with a fully selfconsistent kinetic simulation (Particle-In-Cell Monte Carlo Collision) the collisionless energy absorption mechanisms in a low pressure SW plasma and illustrate conditions where electron heating due to either “transit time mechanisms” or “electromagnetic to electrostatic wave conversion” is dominant. We show how the electron energy distribution function (EEDF) is affected by the heating mechanism. The simulation results also suggest that the tail of the EEDF could be tailored by pulsing the microwave source.