Interactions of Plasmas with Solids and Gases

This chapter provides the interactions of plasmas with solids and gases. It describes how and in what applications such cold plasma can be used and what results can be expected after such plasma processing treatments. The plasma interactions with gases are often used in the plasma chemistry for changes in the chemical composition of gases, gas cleaning from effluents and poisons, gas activations. Two groups of the film deposition technologies are available, according to their respective principles: chemical vapor deposition and physical vapor deposition. The sputtering process is important for the film deposition and it can assist also in the dry etching processes. Important characteristic values in the sputtering are the sputtering threshold and the sputtering yield. An increasing gas pressure increases the collision frequency and decreases the mean‐free paths of particles. This can affect the velocity of neutral and charged particles.