Optical emission kinetics of argon inductively coupled plasma and argon dielectric barrier discharge

摘要

An experimental setup has been built up to create radio frequency (RF) inductively coupled plasma (ICP) and dielectric barrier discharge (DBD), and to investigate the kinetics of the deposition of diamond like carbon films. Optical emission spectra in visible and near ultraviolet region from argon ICP and DBD plasmas created in the machine were measured to analyze their optical emission kinetics. For ICP plasma of argon, the higher RF power input (higher than 500 W for our machine), the stronger ion optical emission strength. But the atom optical emission strength does not get higher the increase of the power input. On the otherwise, the optical emission kinetics of argon DBD discharge behaves in manner of unipolar pulsed discharge. DBD current is composed of a series of breakdown pulses equally spaced in temporal domain. The kinetics of DBD optical emission strength is mainly governed by the DC breakdown voltage of the used gas and therefore by the density of the breakdown current pulse. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. [References: 13]