Zoltan Donko
Scientific advisor, Wigner Research Centre for Physics, Hungary
Zoltan Donko has graduated from the Technical University of Budapest and has been working in the field of low-temperature plasma physics for 30 years. During this time, his research has focused on experimental studies of gas lasers, electron transport in gases, direct-current and radio-frequency plasma sources. He has developed a family of particle-based simulation codes to investigate the physics of these systems at the level of elementary processes of individual particles. Another line of his research has focused on strongly coupled plasmas. He has developed Molecular Dynamics simulation codes to study the thermodynamic behavior (including higher-order correlations) and dynamical effects (collective excitations) of single- and multi-component systems, as well as their transport characteristics (diffusion, viscosity, and thermal conductivity). His recent work is mostly focusing on the physics of electron swarms and kinetic effects (power absorption modes, charged particle dynamics, formation of the particle distribution functions, driving voltage waveform tailoring) in low-temperature plasma sources, which he investigates by Monte Carlo and Particle-in-cell approaches, respectively. He has served for more than a decade as head of department at the Research Institute for Solid State Physics and Optics and later on at the Wigner Research Centre of Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He was / is a member of committees of several international conference series. Besides his position at Wigner Research Centre of Physics, Budapest, he was a Visiting Scholar of Boston College, USA, for several years and currently holds a Mercator Fellow position at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany and a Visiting Professorship at Osaka University, Japan. Besides teaching his Low-Temperature Plasma Physics course at Hungarian universities he has as well given courses on low temperature plasma science and numerical simulation techniques at several universities abroad. He is member of the Editorial Board of the IOP Journal Plasma Sources Science and Technology.
Kinetic effects in charged particle transport, gas breakdown, and electrical discharges
Charged particle transport in electric fields often exhibits non-local characteristics, e.g. in cases when
the field changes appreciably in space and/or time between collisions, or, even in the case of static
fields, in the vicinity of boundaries. An accurate description of the transport under such conditions
calls for the use of the methods of kinetic theory. The non-local transport of charged particles gives
rise to a variety of kinetic effects in gas breakdown, as well as in electrical discharges. Particle-based
simulations have been aiding for some time the understanding of fundamental phenomena in such
physical settings. The rapid development of computational resources allows execution of precise
simulations at the level of elementary processes and gives access to the velocity/energy distribution
functions of the particles, and related transport coefficients, space- and time-resolved. Details of
particle kinetics in transport phenomena, in gas breakdown, as well as in low-temperature plasmas
can now be explored to great details, some of which (electron kinetics in drift tubes, gas breakdown
under radio-frequency fields, particle kinetics, pattern formation, and control of distribution functions in
capacitively coupled plasmas) will be highlighted in the talk. As a rigorous test of the computational
results comparisons will be given with the results of relevant recent experiments.