Studies of atmospheric pressure plasmas

大气压等离子体由于其在工业和医学上的潜在应用，包括伤口愈合和癌症治疗以及农业应用，目前引起了人们的极大兴趣。在所谓的“等离子射流”上已经进行了大量的工作。这些等离子体是通过将强大的交流电场作用于从玻璃喷嘴末端流出的氦气流而产生的。这可能导致产生以每秒10公里的速度运动的等离子体“子弹”。这种等离子子弹流已被用于研究DNA的损伤，以期将其用于医学应用。也有人提出，在中和所谓的“超级细菌”方面，它们比化学清洁方法更有效。研究这种等离子体子弹的温度、电子密度和电离种类是困难的，但如果我们要了解它们的性质以及与生物标本等表面的相互作用，这是必不可少的。在这个项目中，一系列的技术，如光学发射光谱，拉曼光谱和汤姆逊散射将与超高速光学成像一起应用，以收集我们的等离子体的完整数据集。

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.