The role of surface quenching of the singlet delta molecule in a capacitively coupled oxygen discharge

We use the one-dimensional object-oriented particle-in-cell Monte Carlo collision code oopd1 to explore the influence of the surface quenching of the singlet delta metastable molecule O₂(a¹Δ_g) on the electron heating mechanism, and the electron energy probability function (EEPF), in a single frequency capacitively coupled oxygen discharge. When operating at low pressure (10 mTorr) varying the surface quenching coefficient in the range 0.000 01-0.1 has no influence on the electron heating mechanism and electron heating is dominated by drift-ambipolar (DA) heating in the plasma bulk and electron cooling is observed in the sheath regions. As the pressure is increased to 25 mTorr the electron heating becomes a combination of DA-mode and α-mode heating, and the role of the DA-mode decreases with decreasing surface quenching coefficient. At 50 mTorr, electron heating in the sheath region dominates. However, for the highest quenching coefficient there is some contribution from the DA-mode in the plasma bulk, but this contribution decreases to almost zero and pure α-mode electron heating is observed for a surface quenching coefficient of 0.001 or smaller.