Plasma sheath physics: A circuital description, amelioration, and application

TL;DR

This paper reviews a circuital model-based analysis of plasma sheaths, explaining their physical properties, contrasting with traditional models, and discussing diverse applications and future research directions.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive circuital model for plasma sheaths, highlighting its advantages over traditional non-circuital approaches and exploring broad practical applications.

Findings

Circuital model effectively captures sheath inductance, capacitance, and resistance.

Model provides better stability analysis of plasma sheaths.

Applications span fundamental research and industrial processes.

Abstract

A synoptic review of the electrical circuital model-based analysis of laboratory plasma sheaths, alongside their stability features in a realistic broader horizon, is systematically presented herein. It explains the basic physics responsible for the inductive (L_sh), capacitive (C_sh), and resistive (R_sh) properties simultaneously, exhibited by plasma sheaths. The analyzed model sheath behaviors are judiciously described in the light of the state-of-the-art sheath scenarios, illustratively. The sheath-based circuital components are minutely contrasted with the traditionally available circuital counterparts. The applications of the novel circuital sheath model in widespread fields of research having both fundamental and applied importance are discussed. The main merits of modelling plasma sheaths through the circuital formalism over the existing non-circuital theoretical ones are briefly outlined, jointly with future applied scope.