Studies of atmospheric pressure plasmas

Atmospheric pressure plasmas are currently of great interest due to their potential applications in industry and medicine, including wound healing and cancer therapies as well as agricultural applications. A great deal of work has been carried out on so called 'plasma jets'. These are plasmas created by applying strong AC electric fields to a stream of He gas that comes out of the end of glass nozzle. This can result in the generation of 'bullets' of plasma that travel at 10s km per second. Such streams of plasma bullets have been used to study damage in DNA with a view to their use in medical applications. It is also proposed that they can be more effective in neutralizing so called 'superbugs' than chemical cleaning methods.

The study of the temperature, electron density and ionised species of such plasma bullets is difficult but essential if we are to understand their nature and interactions with surfaces such as biological specimens. In this project a range of techniques such as optical emission spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy and Thomson scattering will be applied along with ultra-fast optical imaging to gather a complete data set on our plasmas.