Landau damping and anomalous skin effect in low-pressure gas discharges: Self-consistent treatment of collisionless heating

The enhancement of collisionless heating was analyzed, due to the bounce resonance between the electron motion in the potential well and the external rt electric field. The self-consistent system of equations for the kinetic description of collisionless plasmas of low-pressure discharges was reported, which consist of the nonlocal conductivity operator and the averaged kinetic equation of non-Maxwellian electron energy distribution function (EEDF). It was found that the collisionless heating in rf discharges, when the plasma size was much larger than the width of the wave penetration into the plasma. It was stated that the nonlinear and self-consistent treatment was necessary for the correct description of collisionless heating.