Fluid simulations of glow discharges: Effect of metastable atoms in argon

A one-dimensional fluid simulation of a 13.56 MHz argon glow discharge including metastable species was performed as an example of a coupled glow-discharge/neutral-transport-reaction system. Due to the slow response time of metastables (- 10 ms) direct time integration of the coupled system requires- lo5 rf cycles to converge. This translates to prohibitively long computation time. An “acceleration ” scheme was employed using the Newton-Raphson method to speed up convergence, thereby reducing the computation time by orders of magnitude. For a pressure of 1 Torr, metastables were found to play a major role in the discharge despite the fact that their mole fraction was less than 10V5. In particular, metastable (two-step) ionization was the main mechanism for electron production to sustain the discharge. Bulk electric field and electron energy were lower, and a smaller fraction of power was dissipated in the bulk plasma when compared to the case without metastables. These results suggest that neutral transport and reaction must be considered in a self-consistent manner in glow discharge simulations, even in noble gas discharges. 1