Kinetic simulation of bounded plasmas with the BLOB method

In the industrial applications of plasmas, the interaction of charged particles with the surfaces of the reactor chamber is extremely important. Considerable effort is being devoted to study the formation and the properties of the sheath near confining structures or around solid objects immersed in a plasma. In this paper, results obtained by using the BLOB method to simulate collisionless sheaths are presented. The BLOB method is based on the particle-in-cell (PIC) approach, but uses particles with additional degrees of freedom to describe their size and shape.