Plasma-assisted Laser Deposition for Advanced Surfaces and Innovative Materials

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Advanced materials, engineered surfaces and tailored interfaces are becoming the key factors for generating and pushing innovation in a number of fields, including biomedical, industrial, chemical, mechanical, pharmaceutical, and optical thus guaranteeing competitiveness and impacting the economic growth. One of the most recent, versatile and high-potential deposition technique in solid-state physics, analytical chemistry and surface engineering is the vaporization of condensed matter using photons. A short-pulsed high-power laser beam is focused onto a sample surface thereby converting a finite volume of a solid instantaneously into its vapor phase constituents such as ions and neutrals. A Radio-Frequency-plasma source is added to enhance the reactivity of the background gas with the ablated species. The use of a pulsed laser beam enables a precise control over the growth rate, and allow the deposition of potentially all elements into and onto the more external layers of substrates of all materials. Within this technique, it is potentially possible to confer new feature such as adhesion, wettability, wear, easy-cleanness, catalytic activities, biological performances and so on, to a wide range of substrates. The plasma-assisted laser deposition system we propose to acquire by this proposal to NSERC, is an easy-to-use equipment that is fast becoming the gold standard in academic laboratories that require the modification of substrate surfaces. The flexibility in wavelength and power density allows to ablate almost any material or materials combination. This instrument will meet most of the surface modification requirements of the members of the proposed team for the development of a wide variety of materials and surfaces spanning from biomaterials and medical devices (for the regeneration, replacement, and reconstruction of diseased tissues and organs) to industrial products (for polymeric, antibacterial, photonics, wood, or catalysts), to name only a few. This will strongly help the proposed team to competitively show the value of their fundamental research works on materials and surfaces toward applied real products. This equipment is expected to facilitate the application of the results of their discovery researches toward innovation thus valorizing the output of the researches and exploring the potential to become true products for the benefit of the Society.