EXPERIMENTS AND MODELING OF A HELICON SOURCE

We report on experimental results from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Helicon Source plasma source and numerical models used to understand the observations. These include measurements of plasma dens ity with Langmuir probes, and heating measurements with an electron en ergy analyzer to test transit-time heating. The models describe helico n wave excitation, and electron heating. The wave fields are calculate d using the ANTENA code including collisional and electron Landau heat ing. Numerical and analytic models are used to describe transit-time h eating of electrons and quantify the effect of collisions. (C) 1996 Am erican Vacuum Society.