SGER: Nested-Well Penning-Malmberg Trap for use as a Semiconductor Processing Plasma Reactor

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9627612 Carlos Ordonez This is a Small Grant for Exploratory Research (SGER) for the development of the first analytical and computational description of a nested well Penning-Malmberg plasma processing reactor. The new nested well configuration may allow confinement of overlapping ion and electron plasmas within inner and outer electric potential wells, which provides a means for the confined ion density to exceed the severe ion density limit which occurs within the traditional single well Penning-Malmberg trap. When arranged in this novel nested well configuration therefore, Penning-Malmberg traps become potentially suitable for use as materials processing plasma reactors in microelectronics and other areas. The potential advantages of this type of reactor over existing reactors are significant: improved control of the physical to chemical etching rates with near perfect control of the plasma ion flux to processed surface, cleaner plasmas, equilibrium flat plasma density profiles for near uniformity in processing and low power requirements even with improved plasma confinement control. The design of a proposed follow-on experiment for verifying the operation description is included, in addition to the detailed theoretical analysis which forms the main body of the work. ***