Plasma parameters and active species kinetics in an inductively coupled HBr plasma

Investigations of the influence of gas pressure, input power and Ar mixing ratio on the parameters of inductively-coupled HBr plasma were carried out. The investigations combined plasma diagnostics done by using a double Langmuir probes and plasma modeling represented by the 0-dimensional (global) model with a Maxwellian approximation for the electron energy distribution function. From the experiments, an increase in the gas pressure was found to result in an decreasing electron temperature (3.5 - 3.2 eV for 700 W) and electron density (4.7 × 10¹⁰ - 2.1 × 10¹⁰ cm^-3 for 700 W and 2.7 × 10¹⁰ - 1.2 × 10¹⁰ cm ^-3 for 400 W). A dilution of the HBr by the Ar up to 60 % caused the same effect on the electron temperature (3.5 - 3.0 eV for 5 mTorr and 700 W), but the electron density increased in the range of 4.7 × 10¹⁰ - 1.6 × 10¹¹ cm^-3. For the given range of experimental conditions, the model showed an acceptable agreement with the experiments and, thus, provided nearly adequate data on the kinetics of plasma active species and their densities.