Chuji Wang
Mississippi State University, MS·Physics
A plasma is a gas in which some atoms have been stripped of electrons, so it contains free electrons, ions and neutral molecules together. When small solid grains of dust enter a low-temperature plasma they pick up electric charge and can hang suspended in midair, balanced against gravity.
- Fields
Physics
Engineering
Materials Science
- Topics
dusty plasma
complex plasma
low temperature plasma
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2027
What they work on
- Design an optical trapping system that uses focused laser light to pin down single dust grains suspended in a low-temperature plasma and transport them in a controlled way to any position within the plasma device.
- Apply multiple complementary laser diagnostic techniques to measure how plasma parameters change in response to the physical and chemical processes occurring at the surface of a trapped dust particle.
- Determine how individual particles acquire electric charge and grow in a chemically reactive dusty plasma, building a microscopic picture of particle-plasma interactions.
- Establish single-particle diagnostic methods that can be adopted for other dusty plasma systems, including magnetized dusty plasmas and plasma-based fabrication in industry.
More about the research
These "dusty plasmas" show up in the tails of comets and the rings of Saturn, and also inside the reactors used to etch computer chips, where unwanted dust particles form during manufacturing. In both settings the dust drifts and moves in ways that are hard to control, which limits both basic physics experiments and industrial processes. This collaborative project develops a way to grab hold of individual dust grains in a plasma and move them deliberately, while simultaneously measuring what the grain and the plasma are doing to each other.
Why it matters
Controlling the trajectories and growth of nanometer- to micrometer-scale particles in plasmas was named a key challenge in the 2020 Decadal Assessment of Plasma Science. Precise single-particle measurements of charging and growth could help semiconductor manufacturers manage the dust that contaminates chip fabrication, and could inform understanding of dust in space environments such as comet tails and planetary rings.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Justin Burton
Emory University, GA·Physics
Track the 3D motion of charged micron-sized dust particles in a weakly ionized plasma for tens of minutes, using custom scanning laser-sheet tomography.
Chonglin Zhang
University of North Dakota, ND·Engineering
Develop accurate, scalable algorithms for particle-in-cell (PIC) plasma simulations on unstructured meshes, which are flexible grids that fit complex device geometries, targeting GPU-accelerated supercomputers.
Qi Fan
Michigan State University, MI·Engineering
Test the hypothesis that low-energy ion bombardment acts as atomic-scale local heating, allowing polycrystalline, highly conductive and transparent oxide films such as ITO to grow at room temperature.
The school
Mississippi State University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $342M a year on research, 168 research doctorates a year.
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