Special Issue on future directions in plasma nanoscience

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, plasma nanoscience has become a mature and vibrant field. It deals with both the fundamental science and applications of low-temperature plasmas, ion beams, lasers, and related approaches and how this relates to the fabrication, synthesis, modification, and integration in and of nanoscale materials, structures and functional devices. The complexity often encountered in research in this field intrinsically calls for both fundamental and applied research, both experimental and theoretical. Plasma nanoscience, therefore, is a highly multidisciplinary field, bringing together researchers from physics, chemistry, medicine, engineering, biochemistry, informatics and more. In this context, a dedicated conference is annually organised to bring researchers together and drive the plasma nanoscience field forwards-the iPlasmaNano conference, founded by Prof. Dr.

Engineered biochar improves nitrogen use efficiency via stabilizing soil water-stable macroaggregates and enhancing nitrogen transformation

“…Generally, it is activated further through physical heating and adding particular chemical reagents (ZnCl 2 , H 3 PO 4 , KOH) as activators (Zhou et al 2022). Plasmas having non-thermal or low-temperature discharges and non-equilibrium features, such as high-density reactive species and electrons at low gas temperatures and energy, are beneficial for material processing (Neyts 2019;Zhou et al 2022). Activating biochar with a mechanochemical technique promotes the biochar's effect by improving the surface area, oxygen-containing functional groups, and pore sizes (Naghdi et al 2017;Lyu et al 2018).…”