Research & Projects

Capacitively coupled plasmas are ubiquitous in technology today, and modeling them allows us to understand them better and predict behaviors under certain factors at a low financial cost compared to traditional experimentation. Fully kinetic Particle-in-Cell/Monte Carlo Collisions (PIC/MCC) is a tool to model them, and work has shown that they may not always be as accurate as previously thought.
This initiative was led by myself, with assistance from my advisor, Dr. John Verboncoeur, at MSU and Dr. De-Qi Wen who is now at Dalian University of Technology.
Being members of the Plasma Theory and Simulation Group (PTSG), one of the world leaders in PIC/MCC, we decided to investigate.

Objectives

The primary objective was to identify the cause of the issue at hand which was a divergence of density with respect to decreasing super-particle weight. We were hoping that it was initially a bad study that didn't abide by the well-known accuracy and stability criteria of the model, such as an unresolved Debye length. It turns out, this was not the case.

Results

Ultimately, we found that the underestimation of intracell, or short-range, electron-electron Coulomb collisions leads to a cold particle accumulation in the absence of physics or numerical heating mechanisms for low-energy electrons. This cold-particle accumulation is mostly significant in plasmas with very low electric field regions lacking Ohmic heating such as low-pressure capacitively coupled plasmas, and is often masked by numerical heating.

Working with Dr. Firas Khasawneh and spurring from working with him in CMSE 382, we have been investigating the impact of the model that we enacted in our offering in the Fall of 2025 for the first time. This is done by comparing students' answers in the partially-flipped course to that from an earlier offering in a traditional lecture style.

This requires IRB knowledge, rubric creation and design, and qualitative and quantitative analysis methods.

Objectives

Research Questions:

1. Does the partially-flipped version of the course, taught for the first time in the fall of 2025, achieve significantly different student learning outcomes compared with the course of the same scope taught in a conventional, lecture-style format?

2. Did the students within the partially-flipped section who engaged the most with the course resources achieve better learning outcomes than those who engaged less?

Student learning outcomes are assessed by creating a rubric, aligned with best practices, to independently assess the designated learning outcomes for two different courses offered later in the semester.
Engagement is defined by two factors:

• Out of class:

  • • Did the students access the video (binary)

    • Total number of minutes viewed divided by number of minutes posted

• In-class:

  • • Class attendance during the individual class sessions aligned with the learning objectives

Results

This work is ongoing with the intent to publish.