ATTACHMENT AND IONIZATION IN A SELF-CONSISTENT TREATMENT OF THE ELECTRON KINETICS OF A COLLISION-DOMINATED RF PLASMA

This paper deals with the self-consistent determination of the rf field amplitude for sustaining the steady-state collision-dominated weakly ionized plasmas in the bulk of the rf discharge and of the time-resolved behavior of the isotropic part of the distribution function as well as of relevant macroscopic quantities in plasmas whose particle loss is dominantly determined by electron attachment. The strict time-resolved treatment is based on the nonstationary Boltzmann equation of the electrons and its numerical solution including, apart from electron number conservative collision processes, the electron attachment and ionization.