Particle-in-Cell/Test-Particle Simulations of Technological Plasmas: Sputtering Transport in Capacitive Radio Frequency Discharges

The paper provides a tutorial to the conceptual layout of a self-consistently coupled Particle-In-Cell/Test-Particle model for the kinetic simulation of sputtering transport in capacitively coupled plasmas at low gas pressures. It explains when a kinetic approach is needed and which numerical concepts allow for capturing the often observed nonequilibrium behavior of the charged and neutral particles. At the example of a generic sputtering discharge, both the fundamentals of the applied Monte Carlo methods as well as their conceptual details are elaborated on. Finally, two assumptions that are often exploited in the context of sputtering transport simulations, namely on the energy distribution of impinging ions as well as on the test particle approach, are validated for the proposed example discharge.