Guest Editorial Atmospheric-Pressure Plasmas: Science ... - IEEE Xplore

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basic science issues relating to atmospheric-pressure plasmas ... He is the Associate Provost for research and technology initiatives and a Professor of physics.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 37, NO. 6, JUNE 2009

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Guest Editorial Atmospheric-Pressure Plasmas: Science and Applications

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LASMAS generated at atmospheric pressure date back to the nineteenth century to the work of Faraday and Hittorf, to name just a few of the early pioneers. Siemens was among the first to generate a stable atmospheric-pressure glow discharge plasma using a dielectric barrier discharge configuration [W. Siemens, Poggendorf’s Annalen der Physik und Chemie 12 (1857) 66]. High-pressure plasmas represent an environment where collisions and radiative processes are dominated by the following: 1) stepwise processes, i.e., the excitation of excited states followed by the collisions of the excited species with other particles, resulting in new energy transfer routes, and 2) three-body collisions leading to, e.g., the formation of excimers. The dominance of collisional and radiative processes beyond binary collisions involving ground-state species allows for many applications of high-pressure plasmas such as high

power lasers, opening switches, novel plasma processing applications and sputtering, electromagnetic absorbers and reflectors, remediation of gaseous pollutants, medical sterilization and biological decontamination, and excimer lamps and other noncoherent vacuum-ultraviolet light sources. However, self-sustained diffuse atmospheric-pressure plasmas tend to be unstable at high pressure due to their susceptibility to filamentation and the transition to an arc, which often limits their practical utility. The Special Issue consists of papers that address unresolved basic science issues relating to atmospheric-pressure plasmas and also show the wide range of their practical applications. KURT H. BECKER, Guest Editor Polytechnic Institute of NYU Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA

Kurt H. Becker received the Dipl. Phys. and Dr. rer. nat. degrees from the Universita¨t des Saarlandes, Saarbru¨cken, Germany, in 1978 and 1981, respectively. He is the Associate Provost for research and technology initiatives and a Professor of physics with the Polytechnic Institute of NYU (NYU-Poly), Brooklyn. He was a German Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Windsor, Windsor, ON, Canada, in 1982– 1984. Prior to joining NYU-Poly in 2007, he was a Member of the faculty with Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, in 1984–1988; the City College of CUNY, New York, in 1988–1997; and the Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, in 1997–2007. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed articles and edited or coedited ten books and Special Issues of professional journals, and he is the holder of seven patents on the generation and maintenance of atmosphericpressure plasmas and their application. Prof. Becker is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Thomas A. Edison Patent Award of the Research and Development Council of New Jersey (in 2001), and he holds an Honorary Professorship from the Leopold Franzens Universita¨t, Innsbruck, Austria. His research in atomic, chemical, and plasma physics has been funded by the NSF, DOE, NASA, ARO, AFOSR, ONR, DARPA, and through contracts from industry.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPS.2009.2012715 0093-3813/$25.00 Ó 2009 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 37, NO. 6, JUNE 2009

Dedicated to Erich E. Kunhardt on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday

Erich E. Kunhardt, PhD (Dr.h.c. mult.)

Foreword from the Guest Editor

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HERE are many people among the authors of the articles in this Special Issue who have known Erich Kunhardt longer than I have. Erich has had a very distinguished career as a scientist and a researcher. He is a product of the two institutions, whose alliance and ultimate integration he is currently spearheading, Polytechnic University, where he received the Ph.D. degree in electrophysics in 1976, and New York University, where he received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1969 and 1972, respectively. Erich spent his early years as a physicist at Texas Tech University as part of a distinguished group of scientists who studied pulsed power and electron transport phenomena. His next career step brought him back to New York and to Polytechnic University in 1985, where he assumed the directorship of Poly’s Weber Research Institute. In 1992, Erich joined Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ, as the George Meade Bond Professor of physics. He was subsequently named one of Stevens’ three Institute Professors. After six years as the Dean of the School of Sciences and Arts at Stevens, Erich returned to Polytechnic University in 2006 as its Provost. I first met Erich at a NATO Advanced Study Institute (ASI) in Maratea, Italy, in 1989. There, we had one of those Baha[ moments and Boh, so you are from New York, too.[ Of course, neither one of us was really from New York. I had come to New York from Germany by way of Canada and Pennsylvania and Erich had moved there from the Dominican Republic by way of Texas, but at least, he could claim a few years of prior New York experience as a student. We both now call New York our home, and neither one of us can really envision living anywhere else but in New York. Erich and I stayed in

touch after the NATO ASI. In 1995, we jointly organized the XXII International Conference on Phenomena in Ionized Gases at Stevens. This marked the first time that this 40-year old Bcold war[ plasma science conference was held outside of Europe. We soon discovered that we had many scientific and other academic interests in common, and a year later, I joined Erich at the Stevens Physics Department. At Stevens, we started to collaborate on research into stable atmospheric-pressure plasmas, which are the topic of this Special Issue. This research resulted in several patents, which, in turn, led to the formation of two spin-off companies. The concept of Technogenesis, which is the generation of new technology from academic research breakthroughs and inventions, emerged at Stevens under Erich’s leadership as a new academic paradigm for small technological universities in the 21st century. Technogenesis served as the basis for Poly’s I2E (invention, innovation, and academic entrepreneurship) strategic direction. It is my pleasure and a privilege to serve as Guest Editor of this Special Issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE. No single topic can really do justice to Erich Kunhardt’s diverse range of scientific accomplishments, which have impacted, if not driven, many areas. The choice of BAtmospheric-Pressure Plasmas[ reflects a key area of Erich’s interests and activities in the past 12 years. His paper BGeneration of large-volume, atmospheric-pressure, nonequilibrium plasmas[ [IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 28 (2000) 189] is among the most frequently cited recent papers in this journal. Broadening the scope of the issue to include basic science, as well as technological applications of atmospheric-pressure plasmas, reflects Erich’s conviction that

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PLASMA SCIENCE, VOL. 37, NO. 6, JUNE 2009

basic science achievements are the driving force behind novel and disruptive technology breakthroughs. Dear Erich, please accept this Special Issue as a token of esteem from your friends and colleagues on the occasion of your 60th birthday. As you can see from the breadth of contributions, your pioneering research into atmospheric-pressure plasmas has resulted in a deeper understanding of the basic principles behind

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stable plasma operation at higher pressures and has stimulated a wealth of new applications that utilize stable high-pressure plasmas, some of which are only now emerging. KURT H. BECKER, Guest Editor Polytechnic Institute of NYU Brooklyn, NY 11201 USA