Perspectives on atmospheric-pressure plasmas for nanofabrication

Abstract

Low-pressure, low-temperature plasmas are widely used for materials applications in industries ranging from electronics to medicine. To avoid the high costs associated with vacuum equipment, there has always been a strong motivation to operate plasmas at higher pressures, up to atmospheric. However, high-pressure operation of plasmas often leads to instabilities and gas heating, conditions that are unsuitable for materials applications. The recent development of microscale plasmas (i.e. microplasmas) has helped realize the sustainment of stable, non-thermal plasmas at atmospheric pressure and enable low-cost materials applications. There has also been an unexpected benefit of atmospheric-pressure operation: the potential to fabricate nanoscale materials which is not possible by more conventional, low-pressure plasmas. For example, in a high-pressure environment, nanoparticles can be nucleated in the gas phase from vapour (or solid metal) precursors. Alternatively, non-thermal, atmospheric-pressure plasmas can be coupled with liquids such as water or ethanol to nucleate and modify solution-phase nanoparticles. In this perspective paper, we review some of these recent efforts and provide an outlook for the rapidly emerging field of atmospheric-pressure plasmas for nanofabrication.

A review of plasma–liquid interactions for nanomaterial synthesis

“…There are many partial interpretations [42,44,46,48,55,57,[69][70][71][72][73] on the NM syntheses from the PLIs, here we summarize them and try to give a general mechanism. It is worth pointing out that the plasmas are operated at tenths kPa to atmospheric pressure and they usually have a small size and low gas temperature due to the volatility of water.…”

Synthesis and surface engineering of nanomaterials by atmospheric-pressure microplasmas

“…Atmospheric pressure plasmas have been employed for the processing of nanomaterials due to the simplicity of construction and operation and low cost. However, operation at comparatively high pressures often leads to instabilities and high gas temperatures which can be disadvantageous for materials processing [1,2]. A recent case of plasma, the atmospheric-pressure microplasma (AMP) can help eradicate these issues.…”

Rapid Prototyping of Hybrid, Plastic-Quartz 3D-Chips for Battery-Operated Microplasmas

“…Although microplasmas are a relatively new research area, they are beginning to attract significant interest in areas as diverse as science, engineering, medicine and technology (Tachibana, 2006;Becker et al, 2006;Iza et al, 2008;Foest et al, 16;Becker et al, 2010). To give a limited number of examples, in physics they are used as light sources for spectroscopy (Tachibana, 2006); in materials science for nanomaterials synthesis (Zou et al, 2009;Sankaran et al, 2005;Chiang et al, 2007;Sankaran, 2011;Mariotti & Sankaran, 2011;Mariotti & Sankaran, 2010;Chian & Sankaran, 2010); in medicine for sterilization (Uhm & Hong, 2011) and for plasma medicine Heinlin et al, 2010;Fridman et al, 2008;Kong et al, 2009); in technology for lighting applications (Readle et al, 2007;Boertner et al, 2010) and for plasma television (Boeuf, 2003;Petrovic et al, 2008;Kim et al, 2009;Mun et al, 2009;Lee et al, 2011). In chemistry, among other applications they are used for chemical analysis of samples (e.g., elemental analysis of water samples).…”