Modeling and simulation of the agglomeration of carbonaceous dust in a radio frequency discharge using the Monte Carlo technique

The dust particle growth in plasmas is of major concern for safety issues in fusion reactors, and conversely has important industrial impacts. Dusty plasmas produced in laboratory, fusion, and in astrophysical environments have been therefore widely studied for many years to better understand the involved physical phenomena. In this work, we have investigated modeling and simulation (Ghabbouri et al. in Int Rev Phys 4(3):104–109, 2010; Samir et al. in Chin J Phys 46(2), 2008; Louafi et al. in Int Rev Phys 6(3):297–302, 2012) a new dust-growing mechanism in capacitive radio-frequency plasma of argon/acetylene mixture (Ariskin et al. in Appl Phys 105:063305, 2009). Principally we studied the Brownian agglomeration in the plasma sheath by Monte Carlo simulation. We have developed a FORTRAN code enabling complex numeric investigations of dust particles levitating above the electrode in RF sheath. Charges, forces, balancing radii and other quantities concerning dust particles are analyzed in dependence on plasma state, position within the sheath and applied mathematical models. Commentaries and analysis of numerical results have been made.