PREFACE

During the 1960s, the public face of plasma physics was almost exclusively represented by plasma confinement, with the goal of developing a reactor to produce electricity by thermonuclear fusion. Such a reactor is still being developed, without any guarantee as to its successful achievement, but since then the applications of plasma physics have increased and diversified: one of the best known, besides lighting, is etching in the fabrication of microelectronic computer chips, for which plasma is indispensable. At present, the use of plasmas continues to expand and, from recent research publications, a seemingly limitless number of applications will eventually see the light of day. In this development, plasmas created by radiofrequency and microwave fields play a particularly important role. The present text is basically concerned with plasma physics of interest for laboratory research and industrial applications, with emphasis on the understanding of the physical mechanisms involved, rather than on minute details and high-level theoretical analysis. At the introductory level to this discipline, it is very important to assimilate its characteristic physical phenomena, before addressing the ultimate formalism of kinetic theory, with its microscopic, statistical mechanics approach. In this textbook, the physical phenomena have been translated into more tractable equations, using the hydrodynamic model; this treats the plasma as a fluid, in which the macroscopic physical parameters are the statistical averages of the microscopic (individual) parameters. This textbook is intended for students in their early years at the graduate level, and for engineers who are interested in applications. Its level of difficulty lies somewhat below that of JL Delcroix and A Bers (from Université Paris XI, Orsay and Supélec, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA, respectively), which provides a series of complementary and interesting theoretical treatments. This book is divided into four chapters. Chapter 1 is the introductory part of the textbook. It begins with a description of the plasma, an ionised gas, as a collective and electrically neutral gaseous medium, followed, for illustrative purposes, by a few selected scien-