Modeling of Electronegative Discharges

Modeling electronegative discharges has been a persistently contentious topic for several years past. In this paper, we show results from an extensive simulation survey of electronegative discharges, spanning a wide range of collisionality, electronegativity and negative ion destruction mechanism. We further consider how these simulation results are best represented by simple zero-dimensional formulations with the character of global models. Various transport models have been proposed for these conditions. We show that one of the simplest such models is mostly adequate, and indeed that considerations such as the form of the electron energy distribution function, and other factors usually neglected, such as the negative ion temperature, are usually more significant that the details of the transport model.