HELICONS - THE PAST DECADE

First observed in gaseous plasmas in the early 1960's, helicon dischar ges lay like a sleeping giant until they emerged in the 1980's, when t heir usefulness as efficient plasma sources for processing microelectr onic circuits for the burgeoning semiconductor industry became recogni zed, Research on helicons spread to many countries; new, challenging, unexpected problems arose, and these have spawned solutions and novel insights into the physical mechanisms in magnetized radio-frequency di scharges, Among the most baffling puzzles were the reason for the high ionization efficiency of helicon discharges and the dominance of the right-hand polarized mode over the left-hand one, The most recent resu lts indicate that a nonobvious resolution of these problems is at hand .