Plasma-assisted Laser Deposition for Advanced Surfaces and Innovative Materials

先进材料、工程表面和定制界面正在成为生物医学、工业、化学、机械、制药和光学等多个领域产生和推动创新的关键因素，从而保证了竞争力并影响了经济增长。在固体物理、分析化学和表面工程中，利用光子使凝聚态物质汽化是一种最新的、通用的、高潜力的沉积技术。短脉冲高功率激光束聚焦在样品表面，从而将有限体积的固体瞬间转化为其气相成分，如离子和中性。加入射频等离子体源以增强背景气体与烧蚀物质的反应性。脉冲激光束的使用可以精确控制生长速度，并允许所有元素沉积到所有材料的衬底的更外层。在这项技术中，有可能赋予新的特性，如附着力、润湿性、耐磨性、易清洁性、催化活性、生物性能等，以广泛的基底。我们提议通过向NSERC提交的提案获得的等离子辅助激光沉积系统是一种易于使用的设备，它正在迅速成为需要修改基板表面的学术实验室的金标准。波长和功率密度的灵活性允许烧蚀几乎任何材料或材料组合。该仪器将满足建议团队成员的大多数表面改性要求，用于开发各种材料和表面，从生物材料和医疗设备（用于病变组织和器官的再生、替换和重建）到工业产品（用于聚合物、抗菌、光子学、木材或催化剂），仅举几例。这将有力地帮助被提议的团队竞争性地展示他们在材料和表面方面的基础研究工作对实际应用产品的价值。该设备有望促进他们的发现研究成果在创新方面的应用，从而使研究成果增值，并探索成为造福社会的真正产品的潜力。

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.