In the March issue of Physics World, Bill (W G) Graham of the Queen's University, Belfast, and EPSRC Technological Plasma Initiative describes the wide range of applications that low-temperature plasmas have in industry - but warns that there is still a need to learn much more about their basic properties.
Features
Mar 1, 2001
Technological plasmas
Plasmas are found everywhere in the universe - 99% of the matter in the observable cosmos is in the plasma state. Plasmas are ubiquitous in modern industry as well. They play key roles in the semiconductor, materials and lighting industries, among others, and are used to process everything from microelectronic circuits to aircraft components. Understanding the properties of plasmas is therefore a key technological challenge in a wide range of industrial sectors.
Further reading
J-P Booth 1999 Optical and electrical diagnostics of fluorocarbon plasma etching processes Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 8 249257 (restricted access) U Czarnetzki, D Luggenhölscher and H F Döbele 1999 Space and time resolved electric field measurements in helium and hydrogen RF-discharges Plasma Sources Sci. Technol. 8 230248 (restricted access) R Kinder and M J Kushner 2001 Wave propagation and power deposition in magnetically enhanced inductively coupled and helicon plasma sources J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 19 76 (restricted access) M A Lieberman and A J Lichtenberg 1994 Principles of Plasma Discharges and Materials Processing (Wiley, New York) Buy: Amazon UK/Amazon J R Roth 1995 Industrial Plasma Engineering (Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol) R J Shul and S J Pearton 2000 Handbook of Advanced Plasma Processing Techniques (Springer, Berlin) Buy: Amazon