Ionization instability induced striations in atmospheric pressure He/H2O RF and DC discharges

One-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations of a 1 mm gap atmospheric pressure He/2% rf capacitive discharge showed standing striations in the bulk (Kawamura et al 2016 Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 25 054009). We found that these striations were consistent with an ionization instability induced by non-local electron kinetics. We developed a theoretical instability criterion in good agreement with the numerical results which showed that discharges with larger bulk recombination rates tend to be more unstable. We also determined a critical wavelength such that shorter wavelengths are suppressed by diffusion while longer wavelengths may be restricted by the gap width. In this paper, we extend the gap size of the atmospheric pressure He/2% discharges in the PIC simulations to 2 and 4 mm and drive them by either dc or rf current sources. We compare the results to the 1 mm gap rf simulations and theoretical model in Kawamura et al (2016 Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 25 054009). We find that wider gap discharges tend to be more unstable as they can accommodate a wider range of wavelengths. Furthermore, the mixture of the various excited modes in the wider gaps can lead to distinctly non-sinusoidal spatial oscillations.