Simulation on plasma discharge and transport in large and complex geometric space

doi:10.1088/1674-1056/adfebe

Abstract The plasma discharge and transport properties in the vacuum systems is critical for film deposition controlling. However, industrial-scale vacuum systems usually exhibit large and complex geometries, leading to boundary distortion and convergence difficulty in the conventional simulation techniques. In this work, a PIC/MCC model with FEM solver for non-uniform grids is established to precisely construct a large simulation domain with complex boundaries using the fluid model, and tracks the charged particle movements in non-uniform electromagnetic fields by the PIC/MCC method. The discharge process in a large cylindrical vacuum chamber shows the obvious interaction between the spatial electromagnetic field and plasma. The distribution of deposited ions is consistent with the potential gradient of the sheath. Besides, the ion deposition proportion is increased by more than 3 times and the average ion energy is increased by over 45.0 eV compared with the constant potential, indicating that the background electric field plays a significant role. When the spatial potential is steady, the plasma leads to stable accumulation with the peak density of 10$^{15 }$ m$^{-3}$ achieving convergence at 0.3 μs, thus demonstrating the excellent operation speed and convergence compared to the individual fluid model and PIC/MCC method. The density of the computational grids modified further according to the Debye length reveals a significantly improved computational performance with the convergence process compressed into 0.26 μs and the total runtime reduced by 40%.

Keywords: large and complex geometric space PIC/MCC model with FEM solver for non-uniform grids discharge and transport properties computation performance

Received: 07 May 2025
Revised: 19 August 2025
Accepted manuscript online: 25 August 2025

PACS:	52.50.Dg	(Plasma sources)
	52.55.Jd	(Magnetic mirrors, gas dynamic traps)
	52.65.Rr	(Particle-in-cell method)
	52.65.Pp	(Monte Carlo methods)

Fund: Project supported by the Shenzhen Science and Technology Research Grants (Grant Nos. SGDX20201103095406024 and KJZD20231023100304009), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2023YFA1608802), the Sustainable Supporting Funds for Colleges and Universities in 2022 (Grant No. 20220810143642004), the National Natural Science Foundation for Youth Science Fund Project (Grant No. 52305174), the Postdoctoral Research Fund after Outbound of Shenzhen (Grant No. 6700200201), Shenzhen–Hong Kong Technology Cooperation Funding Scheme (TCFS) (Grant No. GHP/149/20SZ or CityU 9440296), City University of Hong Kong Internal Fund for ITF Projects (Grant No. 9678148), City University of Hong Kong Donation Research Grants (Grant Nos. DON-RMG 9229021 and 9220061), and City University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Grant (SRG) (Grant No. 7005505).

Corresponding Authors: Suihan Cui, Zhongzhen Wu
E-mail: cuish@pku.edu.cn;wuzz@pku.edu.cn

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Shiyi Tang(汤诗奕), Mengran Xiao(肖梦然), Ziqi Ma(马梓淇), Dongjie Yang(杨东杰), Xiaokai An(安小凯), Liangliang Liu(刘亮亮), Suihan Cui(崔岁寒), Ricky K. Y. Fu(傅劲裕), Paul K. Chu(朱剑豪), and Zhongzhen Wu(吴忠振) Simulation on plasma discharge and transport in large and complex geometric space 2026 Chin. Phys. B 35 035202

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Simulation on plasma discharge and transport in large and complex geometric space

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