Eur. Phys. J. Appl. Phys. 56, 24004 (2011)
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjap/2011110194

Influence of nitrogen impurities on the formation of active species in Ar-O₂ plasmas^*

¹ Instituto de Plasmas e Fusão Nuclear, Instituto Superior Técnico, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
² Departamento de Fsica, IST, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal
³ Research Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 49, 1525 Budapest, Hungary
⁴ Departamento de Engenharia Fsica, Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal

^a e-mail: vguerra@ist.utl.pt

Received: 28 April 2011
Accepted: 1 August 2011
Published online: 28 October 2011

Abstract

A self-consistent kinetic model was developed in order to study the production of active species in Ar-O₂ surface-wave microwave plasmas with a relatively small N₂ addition. It is shown that the Ar-O₂-N₂ mixture produces efficiently the same active species as an Ar-O₂ discharge, including oxygen atoms, metastable O₂(a¹∆_g) molecules and the VUV emitting Ar(4s) states. Furthermore, active N-containing species are additionally produced, in particular N atoms and NO ground-state and excited molecules, which makes the ternary mixture very interesting for numerous plasma applications.