PLASMA NANOSCIENCE: FROM ASTRONUCLEOSYNTHESIS TO ORIGIN OF LIFE AND INDUSTRIAL NANOMANUFACTURING

Plasma nanoscience is an emerging research area at the cutting edge of the physics of plasmas and gas discharges, nanoscience and nanotechnology, materials science and engineering, structural chemistry, and life sciences. The existing approaches to fabricating exotic nanostructures and functional nanofilms are mostly process-specific and suffer from cost-inefficient "trial and error" practices. One of the reasons is that the ability to control the generation, transport, deposition, and structural incorporation of the building units of such films and structures, still remains elusive. On the other hand, the pioneering concept of deterministic plasma nanoscience is treated with extreme caution due to inherent chaotic nature of the plasma at the microscopic level. This contribution shows how to challenge one of the previously intractable problems of bridging nine orders of magnitude between the sizes of plasma nanofabrication facilities (~0.5 m) and self-organization of building units on solid surfaces (~0.2 nm). One of the possibilities is to manipulate a variety of building blocks in the plasma sheath that separates the plasma and solid surfaces and control self-organization of nanostructure building blocks on plasma-exposed surfaces and their insertion into the nanoassemblies. The desired nanoassemblies can be engineered by using hybrid multi-scale numerical simulations and sophisticated experimentations. Recent experimental and computational results obtained within the International Research Network for Deterministic Plasma-Aided Nanofabrication suggest the possibility of deterministic synthesis of a large variety of nanostructures and their functional arrays, and are overviewed in this talk. An issue of creation of self-assembled nanodevices on plasma-exposed surfaces is discussed as well. Finally, this talk reveals how the Nature's mastery works in the assembly of nanometre-sized particles in the Universe via the astronucleosynthesis and ion-induced nucleation pathway, exotic nanoassemblies in laboratory plasmas and in possible creation of building blocks of life in primordial Earth.

Note from Publisher: This article contains the abstract only.