Session BP1 - Poster Session I.
POSTER session, Monday morning, November 11
Grand Ballroom CDE, Rosen Centre Hotel
A simple analytic linear theory of anomalous electron heating in inductively coupled plasmas (ICP) is developed. The theory takes into account both collisional and collisionless effects, so that it is valid for any degree of collisionality. Simple analytic expressions for absorbed power density and for total power absorption (heating) are obtained and analyzed. These expressions reduce to the well-known results for strongly collisional and collisionless regimes of ICP, while in the intermediate regime they produce results that are in reasonable agreement with typical experimental results. Negative power absorption regions have been found for a given (exponentially decaying) profile of the electric field in plasma and shown to be similar to those observed experimentally. It has been shown that the negative power absorption is associated with thermal dispersion of the electron current in plasma, rather than with the nonmonotonic behavior of the electric field in plasma in the anomalous regime. A new effect of reduction of electron heating in anomalous regime compared to the purely collisional heating is predicted by our theory. This reduction of heating occurs due to effect of resonant wave-particle interaction at low wave frequencies. A one dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) code with three velocity components (1d3v) has been developed to simulate the anomalous electron heating. Some results of numerical simulation and their comparison with the theory will be discussed.