A possibility to treat surfaces of various materials by bombardment with neutral atomic oxygen excited to the metastable state 2s22p4(S10), (4.1891 V from the ground) is described. The oxygen dissociation and excitation was developed in plasmas generated in reactors of capacitively coupled dielectric barrier discharge configurations comprised of a quartz or ceramic tube passing throughout two annular electrodes and containing a gas mixture of ∼98% Ar with ∼2% O2 ionized at the atmospheric pressure by the radio frequency discharge at 13.56 MHz and flowing at about 6 m/s. As shown in the experiments, the transition 2s22p4(S10)−2s22p4(D12) with a high degree of probability is responsible for the yellow color of afterglow products, and the lifetime of the metastable state can be as long as 5.4 ms in certain cases, allowing one to separate the excited atomic medium from plasma that it produced. It has been shown that the cleaning process included significant Van der Waals bonds liberation to the depth of several hundred angstroms of surfaces treated, which drastically reduced the percentage of carbon-containing contaminants and changed, to some degree, the chemical structure of surfaces containing chemically bonded oxygen.