Hollow cathode discharges with gas flow: numerical modelling for the effect on the sputtered atoms and the deposition flux

Abstract

A model is developed for a cylindrical hollow cathode discharge (HCD), with an axial gas flow (entering through a hole in the cathode bottom). The model combines a commercial computational fluid dynamics program 'FLUENT' to compute the gas flow, with home-developed Monte Carlo and fluid models for the plasma behaviour. In this paper, we focus on the behaviour of the sputtered atoms, and we investigate how the gas flow affects the sputtered atom density profiles and the fluxes, which is important for sputter deposition. The sputtered atom density profiles are not much affected by the gas flow. The flux, on the other hand, is found to be significantly enhanced by the gas flow, but in the present set-up it is far from uniform in the radial direction at the open end of the HCD, where a substrate for deposition could be located.