Modeling and diagnostics of micro-plasmas for application to plasma display panels (PDP)

Summary form only given. Reduction of plasma cell size by /spl sim/40% (presently /spl sim/200 /spl mu/m) in length is an essential step in bringing current flat panel television technology to meet true HDTV standards and moderate size (<30´´) high resolution display terminal in the future. In order to reduce the cell size effectively while maintaining and/or improving the brightness, modeling techniques more sophisticated than the simple fluid model is needed. Such modeling should enable us to test more intricate new physics such as transient modification of the distribution function which can lead to an increase in the population of Xe energy state favorable for UV emission. Kinetic modeling based on particle in cell (PIC) has been known as a powerful tool for such study but one shortcoming in real application is a long computation time. A new algorithm based on kinetic calculation, which can reduce the computational time significantly, is under development. This paper will also address a new technique for a direct measurement of plasma density in a plasma cell comparable to the real PDP cell size. On behalf of this effort, we have constructed a single cell in which plasmas produced across ITO electrodes coated with MgO are studied. The measured electron emission coefficients of MgO will be used to benchmark a new improved kinetic based code. A future plan for simultaneous measurement of plasma parameters and emission coefficients to test the validity of the new algorithm will be discussed.