Low-temperature plasmas are a ubiquitous product of human ingenuity: they light our lives in TL tubes and street lights, they are used extensively to create things from
microelectronics to
specialty steels to huge turbines, and they are even used for the conservation of archaeological artifacts.
The name seems to be a complete
oxymoron: how can a
weird goo of
electrons,
ions,
molecules,
photons, and other exotic
unstable species possibly
have a low
temperature? I mean, you have to feed in tons of
energy in
your average
plasma just to keep it going! We will see where this term comes
from when we explore what a low-temperature plasma is.
On Earth, the most common way of making a plasma is by putting a large voltage across
a gas, not necessarily at atmospheric pressure. We'll restrict ourselves to noble gases now,
because this removes a lot of thorny issues. However, the basic idea is the same for
(almost) all gases.
This electric current starts accelerating free electrons, which
then collide with the ambient molecules. If they have gained enough energy
in the electric field, their collisions can actually knock off the electrons
in the molecules, creating an extra free electron and an ion. If this happens enough,
a so-called Townsend avalanche ensues. If you can now get your cathode to
emit sufficient electrons, you now have a discharge.
This gas discharge will consist of a few electrons and ions floating around in a sea of
neutrals, occasionally ionizing one, or getting lost through recombination with an ion, or
perhaps
just drifting and diffusing to a wall of the plasma, and recombining there.
Now, an odd phenomenon will happen: there are a few electrons floating around in the plasma.
These electrons are being tugged on by the electric field, and gain pretty impressive energies,
which typically range in the range of several tens of thousands of Kelvins. A useful guide
is that one electronvolt (eV), or the energy an electron gains over a voltage difference of
one volt, corresponds to 11600 K. Whoa. They lose this energy again in the ionization process,
which, depending on the plasma gas, can cost between 2 and 20 eV, roughly. Plasma physicists use
electronvolts as a measure of energy. Our idea of slang. Sorry.
Oddly enough, they don't heat up the background gas significantly. This is because of
the difference in mass between electrons and molecules, which is at the very least a factor of
ten thousand, but for heavy molecules possibly a lot more. Now, electrons transfer a bit of energy
proportional to this mass ratio to the molecule per collision, in other words, very little.
Hence, the gas stays cold, that is, about room temperature. And that is where the name
"Low-temperature plasma" starts to make sense.
You can test this little theory by a simple experiment. Take a small marble. Take a big marble,
you know, the ones that are as big as a golf ball. Hit the big marble with the small one. The
big one will move just a tiny bit, and the small one will come back. If you do this trick with two
identical marbles, you can actually transmit all energy if you hit them dead on-a trick well known
to pool players across the globe.
If you increase the power a bit more, the amount of electrons will increase roughly proportional to
the power. You see, the loss mechanisms, recombination, drift and diffusion are proportional to the
amount of electrons, so twice as many electrons means twice as much power needed to replenish them.
Simple, really. The temperature of the electrons tends to drop a bit when you do this, which is not
something that can be explained with simple theory.
Along this process, your amount of electrons and ions is getting larger. So large, in fact, that
even the inefficient collisions between electrons and ions transfer enough heat to heat your gas to
a temperature equal to your electron temperature. At this point, your electron temperature will
roughly be equal to one fifth to one fifteenth of the ionization energy of the background gas. My
favorite rule of thumb, that.
At this time, another important process starts popping up its head: three-particle recombination.
For reasons that are beyond the scope of this write up, electrons and ions don't recombine easily
without a third electron being a spectator. This makes this process becoming faster with the third
power of the electron density. This puts a ceiling on the electron density for a given pressure
and temperature.
However, at this stage, we are getting at a point where the plasma get so energetic it will
melt a typical containing vessel. There is not a lot of interest in the region between plasma
physics that operate at a range of a few tens of thousands of K, which is basically your
garden-variety plasma, like a street light, processing plasma, fluorescent tube, etcetera, and the
really hot, tens of millions of Kelvins plasmas.
So, to conclude, "low-temperature"
simply
means: anything but the million-Kelvin hell of a tokamak. So, one hundred thousand Kelvins still is
low temperature for a plasma physicist.
It's perhaps worth noting that there is quite a lot of friction between the high-temperature plasma
physicists and the low-temperature folks. Something about tokamaks that don't work and toy plasmas.
And funding, of course.
Sources: I'm a theoretical plasma physicist. Node what you know.