Low-temperature plasma physics and technology are diverse and interdisciplinary fields. The plasma parameters can span many orders of magnitude and applications are found in quite different areas of daily life and industrial production. As a consequence, the trends in research, science and technology are difficult to follow and it is not easy to identify the major challenges of the field and their many sub-fields. Even for experts the road to the future is sometimes lost in the mist. Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics is addressing this need for clarity and thus providing guidance to the field by this special Review article, The 2012 Plasma Roadmap. Although roadmaps are common in the microelectronic industry and other fields of research and development, constructing a roadmap for the field of low-temperature plasmas is perhaps a unique undertaking. Realizing the difficulty of this task for any individual, the plasma section of the Journal of Physics D Board decided to meet the challenge of developing a roadmap through an unusual and novel concept. The roadmap was divided into 16 formalized short subsections each addressing a particular key topic. For each topic a renowned expert in the sub-field was invited to express his/her individual visions on the status, current and future challenges, and to identify advances in science and technology required to meet these challenges. Together these contributions form a detailed snapshot of the current state of the art which clearly shows the lifelines of the field and the challenges ahead. Novel technologies, fresh ideas and concepts, and new applications discussed by our authors demonstrate that the road to the future is wide and far reaching. We hope that this special plasma science and technology roadmap will provide guidance for colleagues, funding agencies and government institutions. If successful in doing so, the roadmap will be periodically updated to continue to help in guiding the field.

The 2022 Roadmap is the next update in the series of Plasma Roadmaps published by Journal of Physics D with the intent to identify important outstanding challenges in the field of low-temperature plasma (LTP) physics and technology. The format of the Roadmap is the same as the previous Roadmaps representing the visions of 41 leading experts representing 21 countries and five continents in the various sub-fields of LTP science and technology. In recognition of the evolution in the field, several new topics have been introduced or given more prominence. These new topics and emphasis highlight increased interests in plasma-enabled additive manufacturing, soft materials, electrification of chemical conversions, plasma propulsion, extreme plasma regimes, plasmas in hypersonics, data-driven plasma science and technology and the contribution of LTP to combat COVID-19. In the last few decades, LTP science and technology has made a tremendously positive impact on our society. It is our hope that this roadmap will help continue this excellent track record over the next 5–10 years.

To minimize radiation damage caused by charge buildup or ultraviolet and x-ray photons during etching, we developed a high-performance neutral-beam etching system. The neutral-beam source consists of an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) source and parallel top and bottom carbon plates. The bottom carbon plate has numerous apertures for extracting neutral beams from the plasma. When a direct current (dc) bias is applied to the top and bottom plates, the generated positive or negative ions are accelerated toward the bottom plate. Most of them are then efficiently converted into neutral atoms, either by neutralization in charge-transfer collisions with gas molecules during ion transport and with the aperture sidewalls in the bottom plate, or by recombination with low-energy electrons near the end of the bottom plate. We found that negative ions are more efficiently converted into neutral atoms than positive ions. The neutralization efficiency of negative ions was almost 100%, and the maximum neutral flux density was equivalent to 4.0 mA/cm2. A neutral beam can thus be efficiently produced from the ICP source and apertures in our new neutral-beam source.

For the past 30 years, plasma etching technology has led in the efforts to shrink the pattern size of ultralarge-scale integrated (ULSI) devices. However, inherent problems in the plasma processes, such as charge buildup and UV photon radiation, limit the etching performance for nanoscale devices. To overcome these problems and fabricate sub-10-nm devices in practice, neutral-beam etching has been proposed. In this paper, I introduce the ultimate etching processes using neutral-beam sources and discuss the fusion of top-down and bottom-up processing for future nanoscale devices. Neutral beams can perform atomically damage-free etching and surface modification of inorganic and organic materials. This technique is a promising candidate for the practical fabrication technology for future nano-devices.