Plasma Nanoscience: From Nature's Mastery to Deterministic Plasma-Aided Nanofabrication

Abstract

Summary form only given. Plasma nanoscience is an emerging research area at the cutting edge of the physics of plasmas and gas discharges, nanoscience and nanotechnology, materials science and engineering, and structural chemistry. The existing approaches to fabricating exotic nanostructures and functional nanofilms are mostly process-specific and suffer from cost-inefficient trial and error practices. One of the reasons is that the ability to control the generation, transport, deposition, and structural incorporation of the building units of such films and structures, still remains elusive. On the other hand, the pioneering concept of deterministic plasma nanoscience is treated with extreme caution due to inherent chaotic nature of the plasma at the microscopic level. This contribution shows how to challenge one of the previously intractable problems of bridging nine orders of magnitude between the sizes of plasma nanofabrication facilities (~0.5 m) and self-organization of adsorbed building units on solid surfaces (~0.2 nm). One of the possibilities is to manipulate the ionic building blocks in the non-neutral layer of space charge that separates the plasma and solid surfaces and control self-organization of nanostructure building blocks on plasma-exposed surfaces and their insertion into the nanoassemblies. The results of advanced computer simulation allow one to obtain the microscopic topology of ion fluxes in the vicinity of selected functional nanostructures and the arrangement of adsorbed species into nanopatterns on solid surfaces. These results are linked, via the sheath parameters, to the building unit densities and energies in the plasma bulk and eventually to the process control parameters. On the other hand, the desired nanoassemblies can be engineered by using atomistic ab initio density functional theory approaches. Recent experimental and computational results obtained within the International Research Network for Deterministic Plasma-Aided Nanofabrication suggest the possibility of deterministic synthesis of conical nanotip structures for electron microemitter arrays, and are discussed in this talk. Finally, this talk reveals how the Nature's mastery works in the self-assembly of nanometre-sized particles in the Universe and of exotic nanoassemblies in laboratory plasmas