Sheath parameters for non-Debye plasmas: simulations and experimental estimates

In this paper we report results for MD simulations of the dense, nonideal plasma sheath near a metallic surface. We use Molecular Dynamics (MD) to evaluate sheaths in the non-Debye region and compare with experimental measurements obtained from SEM images. We use direct two-component MD simulations where the interactions between all electrons and ions are computed explicitly. Although MD simulations have limited space and time scales their results can be considered as the lower level output for the multiscale approach. We find that the non-Debye sheath can be extrapolated from the Debye sheath parameters with small corrections. We use experimental data to evaluate the relevance of these arguments.