Study of argon ions density and electron temperature and density in magnetron plasma by optical emission spectroscopy and collisional-radiative model

Abstract

Optical emission spectroscopy (OES) combined with the models of plasma light emission becomes non-intrusive and versatile method of plasma parameters determination. In this paper we have studied the densities of charge carriers and electron temperature in Ar plasma of pulsed DC magnetron in different experimental conditions. Electron density and temperature were determined by fitting of relative emission line intensities calculated from collisional-radiative model (CRM) to experimental ones. The model describes the kinetics of the first 40 excited states of neutral argon Ar and takes into account the following processes: electron impact excitation/deexcitation, spontaneous light emission, radiation trapping, electron impact ionization, and metastable quenching due to diffusion to walls. Then, ions density was determined from relative intensity of 488 nm Ar⁺ emission line and simple CRM accounting excitation from ground states of neutral Ar and ion Ar⁺. The values of electron and ion density agree very well. To test the stability of results, we performed Monte-Carlo calculations with random variation of experimental spectrum as well as of excitation cross-sections and estimated confidence intervals and errors for plasma parameters. Also, we validated OES study by comparison with Langmuir probe measurements. The agreement between optical and probe techniques is satisfactory.