AI4Plasma I: Data-Efficient Surrogate Modeling of Capacitively Coupled Plasma Fields

arXiv:2611.15002v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reference capacitively coupled plasma (CCP) simulations provide spatially resolved plasma fields but are costly to generate across operating conditions. We compare the data efficiency of five surrogate architectures–Coordinate MLP, PCA-Net, U-Net, Fourier neural operator (FNO), and Transolver–for predicting RF-cycle-averaged electron density, ion density, electric potential, and electron temperature in 1D planar and 2D axisymmetric GEC CCP benchmarks. We assess the number of reference simulations needed to achieve 1% and 2% mean relative L2 error for parameter-interior and parameter-boundary test cases, and examine architecture-specific mechanisms. FNO achieves the lowest or joint-lowest reference-case requirement in seven of eight comparisons. In 1D, FNO reaches 1% interior error with 50 training cases, compared with 100 for Transolver and 200 for U-Net. In 2D, FNO and U-Net each reach 1% interior error with 100 cases; FNO and Transolver each reach 2% parameter-boundary error with 200 cases, compared with 400 for U-Net. At the stricter 1% 2D parameter-boundary target, Transolver requires 400 cases versus 800 for FNO. Additional analyses investigate FNO spectral modes and padding, U-Net skip connections, Transolver adaptive slicing, and PCA-Net projection versus prediction error. The results support FNO as a data-efficient baseline for the tested CCP settings, while showing that the preferred architecture depends on the accuracy target and operating-parameter region.