Pulsed RF-Discharge in Zyflex-Chamber

Abstract

Interrupting rf-discharge is a well known method to control processes in plasmas. For example in semiconductor processing, it can be used to control growth of particles from material out of the plasma phase. By switching of the discharge, grown "fog" can be driven out of the plasma by gravity. [2] On the other hand, pulsing the plasma gives a good possibility to tune effective electron temperature independently from plasma density. This way you could tune parameters in complex plasma systems like electron density, electron temperature, screening length and particle charge in a more flexible way. Ekoplasma is a project designing the future lab for complex plasma research on the inter- national space station ISS. Together with its large cylindrical chamber Zyflex it will have many features to cover a wide range of physics in complex plasma research, now to be tested in lab and on parabolic flights. It also includes a multifunctional rf-generator which can be pulsed at different frequencies with on/off times even down to 50 µs. Combining this switching features with micro gravity conditions it will be possible to tune plasma parameters without loosing particles due to gravity pushing the particles. In this contribution, we show the plasma pulsing feature of the current lab setup of EkoPlasma and some first results from lab experiments.