A "Transforming Energy" Lecture by Mark Kushner
January 31, 2008

Abstract

Plasmas find extensive use in every day technologies, either directly such as lighting and plasma display panels, or indirectly through their use in manufacturing of a wide range of products, from microelectronics to commodity polymers. Plasmas act as a power transfer medium in which power from the wall plug is converted to the kinetic energy of electrons and ions. These energetic charged species, through collisions in the gas phase and with surfaces, produce chemically active species. These species modify materials, as in microelectronics fabrication, or are themselves the end product, as in photons. Plasmas are potentially highly energy efficient sources of activation energy due to our ability to customize the distribution of electron and ion energies to selectively produce desired excited states and surface species. Improvements in those plasma activated processes have the potential for large improvements in energy utilization. For example, 22 percent of the electrical power generated in the United States is used for lighting and a large fraction of that is used to excite a single excited state of the mercury atom in plasma based lighting. In this talk, results from computational investigations of plasma activated chemistry for manufacture of high value materials will be discussed with emphasis on highly energy efficient and selective processes. Examples will be used from two extremes of materials processing: low pressure plasmas for microelectronics fabrication and atmospheric pressure plasma functionalization of biomaterials. Means of optimizing these processes for desired material characteristics while minimizing energy use will be discussed.

Biography

Mark J. Kushner received a B.A. in astronomy and a B.S. in nuclear engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1976. His M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in applied physics were from the California Institute of Technology in 1977 and 1979, respectively, where he was also the Weizmann Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Kushner served on the technical staffs of Sandia National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before joining Spectra Technology, where he was director of electron, atomic and molecular physics. In 1986, Kushner moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he was the Founder Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His administrative roles included Assistant Dean of Academic Programs and Associate Dean for Administrative Affairs in the College of Engineering, Interim Head of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Interim Head of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.

He joined Iowa State University as dean of engineering and the Melsa Professor of Engineering in January 2005. His primary academic appointment is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and he is an affiliate of the Departments of Chemical and Biological Engineering; and Material Science and Engineering. Kushner continues his active research program in his role as dean.

He has published more than 230 journal articles, made more than 350 contributed presentations and delivered more than 200 invited conference talks and seminars on topics related to plasma materials processing, lasers, lighting sources and pulse power plasmas. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, IEEE, the Optical Society of America, the American Vacuum Society, International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, and the Institute of Physics.

Kushner has received the Semiconductor Research Corporation Technical Excellence Award, the Tegal Thinker Award for Plasma Etch Technology, the AVS Plasma Science and Technology Award, and the IEEE Plasma Science and Applications Award. He was also a Japanese Society for Advancement of Science Fellow. He serves on the editorial boards or is associate editor of Transactions of Plasma Science, Journal of Physics D, Plasma Processing and Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing and Polymers; and is Editor-in-Chief of Plasma Sources Science and Technology.