| Abstract: | In this talk I will describe two selected topics, currently constituting the frontier of plasma science: plasma-assisted synthesis of nanomaterials and plasma interactions with liquids, biological tissues and cells. Both of these research areas deal with mostly non-equilibrium environments and include a multitude of different species with a wide variety of energies, sizes and chemical potentials, interacting across all the possible phases of matter, from gas to liquid, solid and crystal phases. These complex, multiphase plasma environments, hold very intriguing technological potentials, while also posing many scientific challenges for one who seeks to understand the basic phenomena occurring in these systems: large density and temperature gradients, unknown plasma characteristics, reactivity transfer at the plasma–liquid/solid interface, interfacial charging, droplet transport and self-organization of plasmas in contact with liquid/solid. The phenomenon of plasma self-organization into coherent structures and patterns is particularly interesting, because it modulates the characteristics of the plasma, influencing the density and the energy of the charged particles, chemical composition, species transport along and across the plasma-tissue/liquid interface, radiation and electric fields. |
