The role of thermal energy accommodation and atomic recombination probabilities in low pressure oxygen plasmas

Surface interaction probabilities are critical parameters that determine the behaviour of low pressure plasmas and so are crucial input parameters for plasma simulations that play a key role in determining their accuracy. However, these parameters are difficult to estimate without in situ measurements. In this work, the role of two prominent surface interaction probabilities, the atomic oxygen recombination coefficient gamma(O) and the thermal energy accommodation coefficient alpha(E) in determining the plasma properties of low pressure inductively coupled oxygen plasmas are investigated using two-dimensional fluid-kinetic simulations. These plasmas are the type used for semiconductor processing. It was found that aE plays a crucial role in determining the neutral gas temperature and neutral gas density. Through this dependency, the value of alpha(E) also determines a range of other plasma properties such as the atomic oxygen density, the plasma potential, the electron temperature, and ion bombardment energy and neutral-to-ion flux ratio at the wafer holder. The main role of gamma(O) is in determining the atomic oxygen density and flux to the wafer holder along with the neutral-to-ion flux ratio. It was found that the plasma properties are most sensitive to each coefficient when the value of the coefficient is small causing the losses of atomic oxygen and thermal energy to be surface interaction limited rather than transport limited.