Chemical and physical characterization of a cold plasma

Details

Supervisors

Lauzin, Clément

Faculty

Ecole polytechnique de Louvain

Degree label

Master [120] : ingénieur civil physicien

Abstract

Ionic complexes are charged species formed by interaction between ions and neutral ligands. These species take action in interstellar/interplanetary media, in solvation phenomena and nucleation processes and then, their spectrocopic study is a paramount importance in chemical physics. The production of ionic complexes in laboratory needs to set up techniques in order to obtain a high ion current at a low effective temperature. The media that allows these two conditions is a cold plasma. This plasma can be formed by cooling a gas using a supersonic isentropic expansion. This expansion of gas can be made by using a pulsed valve and then, ionized by using an ionization technique. In this master thesis, ionic complexes are produced via the generation of a cold plasma. The plasma is produced by using a pulsed supersonic expansion coupled to an ionization method. A first chemical characterization was done by using a high-resolution mass spectrometer that was designed and build during this year. A physical characterization was made by using imaging techniques. These first charaterizations are made to do spectroscopic studies of the ionic complexes produced in the beam.