Compact Plasma and Focused Ion Beams

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Introduction

Plasma

What Is Plasma?

A plasma is a system of interacting free electrons and ionized atoms or

molecules, which exhibit collective behavior due to long-range Coulomb

forces whose dependence upon the distance r goes as 1/r

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. However, not all

media containing charged particles can be classied as plasmas. There are

certain criteria that must be fullled to be called a plasma. Before we delve

ourselves more into plasmas, let us look into the brief history of plasmas.

The word plasma originates from the Greek language and means “some-

thing molded.” It was applied for the rst time by Tonks and Langmuir

in 1929 to describe the inner reg ...