Abstract
Scientific breakthroughs tend to come in spurts when unique societal, economical, and political circumstances conspire (knowingly or unknowingly) and create an environment ripe for creativity. The field of low temperature plasma (LTP) recently experienced such an upheaval, which this paper attempts to relate in some details. There have been “roadmap” papers published before, which look towards the future of the field, but all roads start somewhere and even “new” roads are often paved over older roads that were discovered and traveled by early pioneers. With the sharp decrease in funding for fusion research in the USA in the early 1990s the plasma science community was faced with a dire situation that threatened to choke off plasma physics advances. However, in the background and far from the visibility accorded to fusion research, a few laboratories were quietly engaged in innovative research that in due time revolutionized the LTP field and breathed new life into plasma science. Groundbreaking applications of LTP were investigated that until today constitute most of the LTP research activities. These innovations spanned a wide spectrum that included the invention of novel devices, improvement of existing ones, and the deployment of these devices to areas ranging from industrial to biomedical applications. These efforts turned out to have impactful scientific and societal implications. In this paper plasma sources and applications developed during this uniquely innovative decade are briefly discussed.
Highlights
Scientific investigations of the fourth state of matter, plasma, first took place in the19th century, the field only established itself as a genuine field of study in the early decades of the20th century
The development of high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) [15,16]. It is remarkable or improvement of existing ones were proposed, amongst them the use of nanoseconds high voltage pulses to drive dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) [9,10,11], the resistive barrier discharge (RBD) which allowed the use of DC or 50/60 Hz voltages [12] and the development of low temperature plasma jets, which are today used extensively in biomedical applications [13]
Nanoseconds pulses were previously used for low pressure discharges in gas lasers, but they were employed to improve the performance of DBDs and to generate atmospheric pressure low temperature plasma with enhanced gas phase chemistry only in the late 1990s/early 2000s [9,10,11]
Summary
Scientific investigations of the fourth state of matter, plasma, first took place in the. The first ever book chapter of note to mention here that the main interest of AFOSR at the time was to use non-equilibrium air discussing early work (from to 2004). The development of high power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) [15,16] It is remarkable or improvement of existing ones were proposed, amongst them the use of nanoseconds high voltage pulses to drive DBDs (instead of sinusoidal voltages) [9,10,11], the resistive barrier discharge (RBD) which allowed the use of DC or 50/60 Hz voltages (instead of kHz frequencies) [12] and the development of low temperature plasma jets, which are today used extensively in biomedical applications [13]. These have experienced noteworthy recent advances and have been reviewed by colleagues who are much more expert in these topics than the author of this paper
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