Historical research guide · 0959 · 2009

Temporal behavior of cold atmospheric plasma jet

Alexey Shashurin · Mikhail N. Shneider · Arthur Dogariu · Richard B. Miles · Michael Keidar

In one minute

A cold atmospheric plasma jet is the small violet plume that comes out of a glass tube when helium flows through it and a few kilovolts are switched across a pair of electrodes. To the eye it is a steady flame. Alexey Shashurin and his colleagues at George Washington University and Princeton pointed three independent instruments at one — microwave scattering off the plasma, a fast camera, and a current probe on the jet itself — and showed it is nothing of the kind. The instant the gas breaks down, a compact luminous front is launched, the object this field calls a plasma bullet, and it rides outward along the gas flow. Behind it, along the path it has just taken, a conducting afterglow column is left standing in open air — and that column lives three to five microseconds, longer than the bullet that made it. The jet is therefore two things at once: a fast travelling front, and a persistent channel that the next pulse finds already waiting for it.

Connection

Chapter 9 is about self-organising plasma structures that hold together for longer than the thing that made them, and this is one of the cleanest small-scale examples in the literature — measured three ways, in ordinary room air, at atmospheric pressure. It also supplies the diagnostic that makes such measurements possible at all: microwave scattering, which reads a millimetre-scale plasma in time without touching it.

From the source

A streamer — the object the field calls a plasma bullet — is generated immediately after the breakdown of the gas and propagates outward along with the gas flow.Abstract, second sentence
An afterglow plasma column remains standing along the path the streamer has passed, so the discharge leaves a conducting channel behind it rather than a spent trail.Abstract, third sentence
The lifetime of that afterglow plasma column is three to five microseconds, which is longer than the lifetime of the streamer itself.Abstract, fourth sentence
The temporally resolved evolution of the jet’s parameters was obtained by three independent means used together — microwave scattering, fast photographing, and measurement of the jet currents — so the two-stage picture does not rest on any single instrument.Abstract, first sentence, and title
Read as a whole, the Letter replaces the picture of a plasma jet as one moving luminous object with a two-part structure: a fast ionising front, and a longer-lived conducting column left in its wake — which is what makes the jet behave as a continuous plume to the eye while being profoundly discontinuous in time.Abstract, read as a whole; confirmed by the same authors’ companion measurement, Applied Physics Letters 96, 171502, 2010
The measurement to watch is the absolute electron density in that channel, resolved in time, and what it does to the channel that the next voltage half-cycle finds waiting: the same five authors reported it a year later at about 5 to 10 times 10 to the 13 per cubic centimetre in the streamer head, decaying by electron attachment over a few microseconds, and found a second breakdown of the same channel roughly a microsecond after the first.Companion paper, Applied Physics Letters 96, 171502, 2010, figure 4 and the closing summary

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.3153143

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

PUBLICATION. Applied Physics Letters volume 94, issue 23, article 231504, published 8 June 2009 by the American Institute of Physics. Copyright AIP Publishing; Crossref records no licence, Unpaywall returns is_oa false with an empty location list, and Semantic Scholar records the article as closed, so only the published abstract is reproduced here. WHAT WAS READ, 2026-09-08. No open copy of this Letter was reachable: the publisher’s page refuses automated retrieval, OpenAIRE lists no green location, and the archived publication list of the authors’ own laboratory at George Washington University names the paper but carries no file for it. The abstract below is the article’s own abstract as deposited with Crossref by AIP Publishing, cross-checked word for word against the copies carried by OpenAlex and by the CoLab record for the same digital object identifier. To write the summary and the claims accurately the editorial rail also downloaded and read in full the same five authors’ immediate follow-up, Temporary-resolved measurement of electron density in small atmospheric plasmas, Applied Physics Letters 96, 171502, received 21 February and published 27 April 2010, which was published openly by the authors’ laboratory and preserved in the Internet Archive; that paper describes the identical apparatus, cites this Letter as its reference 10, and is the source of every figure quoted in the note below. Locators say in each case whether a claim comes from this Letter’s abstract or from the 2010 companion. AFFILIATIONS as printed on the companion paper: Shashurin and Keidar, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Science, The George Washington University, Washington DC; Shneider, Dogariu and Miles, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University. Given names are expanded from the authors’ own institutional records; the journal prints initials. WHAT THE COMPANION ADDS. Calibrating the same Rayleigh microwave scattering against Teflon, alumina, polyethylene and quartz projectiles of known permittivity, the team measured absolute electron density in the jet at about 5 to 10 times 10 to the 13 per cubic centimetre in the streamer head, decaying over a few microseconds by electron attachment, and resolved a second, later breakdown of the same channel about one microsecond after the first at 2.7 kilovolts drive. DATA NOTE for the registry: the archived publication list of the George Washington University Micro-propulsion and Nanotechnology Laboratory cites this paper as Applied Physics Letters volume 94, number 235104; the article number in Crossref, OpenAlex, CoLab and in the authors’ own companion paper is 231504, and that is what this sheet uses. RELATED PAGES on this site: the same laboratory’s open 2023 review of flexible cold atmospheric plasma jet sources at /library/stm-aeb20c0565, laboratory magnetically driven plasma jets at /library/stm-45915b0e1d, the streamer-knot model of ball lightning at /library/stm-14147817fb, and spherically symmetric plasmoids at /library/stm-189c2e0339.

How to cite it

Alexey Shashurin, Mikhail N. Shneider, Arthur Dogariu, Richard B. Miles, Michael Keidar (2009) Temporal behavior of cold atmospheric plasma jet doi:10.1063/1.3153143

Where it sits in the curriculum

Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbs