Simulation of the electromagnetic characters of a Faraday-shielded antenna in a helicon wave plasma source

In this article, a structure that employs a Faraday shield between the Shoji antenna and the dielectric tube, which aims to reduce the dielectric wall sputtering, is investigated for the helicon wave plasma (HWP) sources. Faraday shield is usually used between the antenna and the reaction chamber to reduce the radiation from the high electromagnetic field generation, as well as to prevent the sputtering of the antenna material from polluting the reaction chamber during the discharge. Here, the influence of the Faraday shield on the longitudinal and radial electric field of the antenna is analysed through COMSOL Multiphysics^TM. Significant attenuations of both the longitudinal and radial fields are observed in the presence of the shield. In addition, by comparing the electric field distribution under two different shielding parameters, it is found that the shielding effects are not the same. Therefore, a detailed study of two kinds of design (pitch and gap) for the shield was carried out. The results show that the pitch has a little impact on the overall shielding effect when the gap is unaltered. The best shielding performance appears when we set the pitch at T of 8 and 10. In addition, the shielding effect also becomes worse as the gap increases while the pitch remains unchanged. A relatively good shielding effect can be produced by setting the gap to the value of 4–8 mm (a gap/pitch ratio of 2/15–4/15). This work provides a theoretical basis for designing a Faraday shield structure between the antenna and the dielectric tube, which is helpful to realize stable and controllable HWP discharges.