Worldwide, the research groups have been dealing with several innovative drilling technologies. Their common aim is to significantly decrease the overall price of the drilling process, particularly to keep the high constant speed, energy efficiency and shorter drilling time. There are above twenty innovative non-contact technologies at different maturity such as: laser, water jet, plasmatorch, ultrasonic, microwave, and several others. However few of them reached Proof-of-the-Concept in laboratory and are currently developed in outside testing sites. This paper presents one of such activities – development of technology based on electrical plasma for hard rock drilling. During its development, another application was identified – milling of steel casing and cement for well Plug&Abandonment operations. Both of these applications are developed by the team of engineers led by the authors. The electrical plasma-based tool changes completely from its inception the paradigm of the drilling as well as casing milling. The most important advance in comparison to conventional plasmatorch technology is that the electrical arc with temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees Kelvin heats directly the surface, especially the radiation component, with minimalized heating of intermediate gas (the intermediate gas flow in conventional plasmatorches reduces the efficiency of heat transfer into the rock). Moreover, the arc creates area-wide, relatively homogeneous heat flow from spiral arc on the whole surface for high-intensity disintegration process. Compared to conventional plasmatorch technology, electrical plasma-based technology allows the use of electrohydraulic phenomenon, generating shock waves for the destruction and transport of disintegrated material. System also allows obtaining electrical and/or optical characteristics of the arc in the interaction with the rock to derive indirect sensory information (e.g. online spectroscopy for logging while drilling.). This paper includes the nature of challenges in both application areas – hard rock drilling and casing milling, the description of the developed solutions, the results obtained until now, possibilities of some spin-off technologies using the same core technology concluded by expected impacts. The technology has been tested on various rock types including sandstone, limestone, halite, granite and quartzite. Currently, the demonstration prototype is being tested for drilling of testing borehole in the quarry.

We have demonstrated nondestructive detection of cold atoms with a probe laser by a frequency-modulation spectroscopy technique. We were able to tune the probe laser and its sidebands far from atomic resonance to reduce the spontaneous emission to less than 0.2 photon per atom during detection.

The formation of negative ions produced in a negative point-to-plane corona discharge fed by a Ar/N2/CH4 gas mixture has been studied using mass spectrometry. The measurements were carried out in flowing regime at ambient temperature and a reduced pressure of 460 mbar. The CN- anion has been found to be the most dominant negative ion in the discharge and is believed to be the precursor of heavier negative ions such as C3N- and C5N-. The most likely pathway for the formation of such molecular anions is H-loss dissociative electron attachment to HCN, H3CN and H5CN formed in the discharge. These same anions have been detected in Titan's atmosphere and the present experiments may provide some novel insights into the chemical and physical mechanisms prevalent in Titan's atmosphere and hence assist in the interpretation of results from the Cassini Huygens space mission.