Modeling of very high frequency large-electrode capacitively coupled plasmas with a fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell code

Phenomena taking place in capacitively coupled plasmas with large electrodes and driven at very high frequencies are studied numerically utilizing a novel energy- and charge-conserving implicit fully electromagnetic particle-in-cell / Monte Carlo code ECCOPIC2M. The code shows a good agreement with different cases having various collisionality and absorbed power. Although some aspects of the underlying physics were demonstrated in the previous literature with other models, the particle-in-cell method is advantageous for the predictive modeling due to a complex interplay between the surface mode excitations and the nonlocal physics of the corresponding type of plasma discharges operated at low pressures, which is hard to reproduce in other models realistically.