Hydrogen plasma environments are becoming critical to several high-impact technologies, including fusion energy, plasma catalysis, and EUV lithography. In all of these fields, systems are being driven towards higher plasma powers, leading to more severe plasma-surface interactions and accelerated material degradation. Despite this growing need, current laboratory test facilities cannot yet reproduce hydrogen plasma exposure conditions at the intensity and timescales required for accelerated lifetime testing. Combining the concepts of different plasma sources should allow developing sources that expose samples to high flux of 10^16 ions/(cm2s) while maintaining the ion energy below 10 eV, exceeding flux of the current state-of-the-art ECR plasma sources. This innovation will enable lab-scale measurements of lifetime testing for plasma facing surfaces, while maintaining their corresponding degradation mechanisms.

In this postdoctoral project, you will work with different hydroge...