On the Competition Between the Phenomena Involved in the Aerosol Dynamics in Sputtering Nonequilibrium Plasma

摘要

- We made use of a combination of three models that describe plasmaequilibrium, cluster kinetics and aerosol dynamics in order to investigatesolid carbonaceous dust formation in a DC gas discharge where the carbon sourceis provided by a graphite cathode sputtering. This enabled us to determine thetime-evolution of some of the particle characteristics, e., g. total density,mean-diameter, average-charge as function of the sputtering yield. We showedthat for few minutes discharge duration, the particle density reaches 10 7-10 8cm-3 , the particle mean diameter is approximately 40 nm and the particle sizedistributions are bimodal for all the investigated conditions. We also showedthat the variation of the sputtering yield affects in a quite unexpected waythe interplay between the phenomena involved in the aerosol dynamics.Basically, larger sputtering yields result in larger density and coagulationrate on one hand, and in a limited nucleation and surface sticking kinetics onthe other hand.