The Open University

The people's plasma - engineering physics and the physics of engineering. The plasma medium in electrically conducting gases is versatile stuff. On one hand it is used as a light source in fluorescent lamps and on the other as a source of chemical and physical processes in a vast range of surface engineering schemes. In principle you can make almost anything with plasma, provided you know how to control the myriad production and loss processes that are involved.  The people's plasma is about some of the options: manipulating the physics is at one extreme; using artificial intelligence is at the other.