A fully-implicit Particle-In-Cell Monte Carlo Collision code for the simulation of inductively coupled plasmas

We present a fully-implicit electromagnetic Particle-In-Cell Monte Carlo collision code, called NINJA, written for the simulation of inductively coupled plasmas. NINJA employs a kinetic enslaved Jacobian-Free Newton Krylov method to solve self-consistently the interaction between the electromagnetic field generated by the radio-frequency coil and the plasma response. The simulated plasma includes a kinetic description of charged and neutral species as well as the collision processes between them. The algorithm allows simulations with cell sizes much larger than the Debye length and time steps in excess of the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition whilst preserving the conservation of the total energy. The code is applied to the simulation of the plasma discharge of the Linac4 H⁻ ion source at CERN. Simulation results of plasma density, temperature and EEDF are discussed and compared with optical emission spectroscopy measurements. A systematic study of the energy conservation as a function of the numerical parameters is presented.