Brandie Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio programme What on Earth explains how the blockage of the Strait of Hormuz has affected Canadian agriculture and the reasons for how that may lead to new fertilizer technology adoption, Note Links have been removed,
It sounds like weird science and some have dismissed it as “snake oil.”
But an emerging crop fertilizer technology is gaining interest amid an acute shortage caused by wars in the Middle East. Though research is in early stages and has not yet been peer-reviewed, the method is also being explored as one possible way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from traditional chemical fertilizers.
The cold plasma method essentially replicates lightning, similar to the novelty lightning globes popular in the ’90s.
The fertilizer is made on site at individual farms, a potential advantage as geopolitical conflicts disrupt supply.
About one-third of the world’s fertilizer is shipped through the Strait of Hormuz, where traffic has been severely restricted since the beginning of March [2026]. Compounding the problem, Iran is a major producer of fertilizer and nitrogen, and its industry has been damaged by airstrikes.
Jeff Harrison, chair of Grain Farmers of Ontario, said that has pushed fertilizer prices sharply higher.
“Expenses are exceeding revenues this year, and that’s not a pretty picture for farmers,” said Harrison, who grows corn and soybeans in Quinte, about 100 kilometres from Kingston, Ont.
Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article provides scientific details about ‘lightning fertilizer’,
To understand how cold plasma fertilizer works, it helps to get a handle on the vocabulary. Plasma is a word used to describe a component in your blood, but it has a different meaning in physics.
“If you put energy into liquids, you can make them gaseous,” said Stephan Reuter, a professor of plasma physics from Polytechnique Montréal who is researching plasma fertilizer. “And if you put more energy into these gases, you can transfer these gases into a plasma.”
Lightning is plasma. The northern lights are plasma. The little shock you get when you walk across a carpet and then touch a light switch is plasma, he said.
Lightning is a natural fertilizer because its energy converts nitrogen in the air into a form plants can absorb, Reuter told What on Earth. That combines with rainwater to make nitric acid, and falls onto soil as liquid fertilizer.
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Next, Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article covers the current situation in Canada, Note: Links have been removed,
A couple of different North American manufacturers are making devices that mimic this process.
Machines made by U.S. company Green Lightning are the most widely distributed in Canada. They are sold here by Nytro Ag Corp., run by Chris Nykolaishen, a farmer who grows wheat and canola near Kamsack, Sask.
Since starting in 2024, he said he has sold about 200 Green Lightning machines to 82 farms. Some larger farms have bought two or more machines, but that is a small group among the 189,874 farms counted in Canada’s last census.
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The most common Green Lightning system, the Thunder 365, is not quite two metres high and about 1.2 metres wide and deep. Nykolaishen said it costs $66,500.
A plasma reactor inside each machine creates the kind of colourful lightning seen in novelty globes. From there, it breaks apart nitrogen molecules to make nitrous oxide, Nykolaishen said.
That is sent into a special chamber, where it is infused into water to make nitric acid, becoming liquid fertilizer.
Nykolaishen recommends farmers start with a small trial in their first season and get to know the specifications, including the need for a reverse-osmosis system to filter the water.
Hard-won cynicism
That cautious approach is more appealing for farmers, he said, because many “look at this as if it’s snake oil.” The cynicism is hard won, he said.
“There’s been a lot of things that have come through agriculture that just haven’t worked out.”
For those who do make the leap, Nykolaishen said the system can produce 36,500 gallons (about 140,000 litres) of fertilizer a year if run continuously. That is enough to fertilize 1,000 acres (400 hectares) of wheat and canola with no other fertilizer, or a larger farm when combined with other products.
Each season, the farmers he works with are refining the system, but they need more data.
“The hard thing about agriculture is you really only get one shot at R&D every year, so you gotta make sure you make it count,” he said.
In these images supplied by Stephan Reuter, left, a professor of engineering physics at Polytechnique Montréal, the middle photo shows plasma filaments moving between two metal electrodes. The filaments generate reactive molecules from air, which are brought into water to make liquid fertilizer for hydroponic plants. At right, a technology demonstration used in high school and CEGEP settings. (Submitted by Stephan Reuter)
Reuter’s team at Polytechnique Montréal has funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to test cold plasma fertilizer. He said it is the only team in the country doing so.
The group is testing the fertilizer in a greenhouse setting on hydroponic lettuce. The findings are relevant, Reuter said, but not an apples-to-apples comparison for soil in a field of wheat or corn.
A credible “tutorial review” explaining the cold plasma method and its potential advantages was published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s journal RSC Sustainability in 2025, but the research is so new there are not yet peer-reviewed studies.
There are also questions about how well the system will work at scale and integrate with existing farm equipment, since many farms use rigs designed to spread dry, granular fertilizer, not liquid.
But that wasn’t a problem on the Yorkton, Sask., farm near the Manitoba border where Jordan Keep and his business partner tried the system for the first time last year.
“We were already running liquid fertilizer, so we didn’t have to change much in terms of our seeding equipment,” he said.
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Climate benefits are covered in Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article, which also features an embedded radio segment (27 mins. 49 secs.) about ‘lightning fertilizer’ and Canadian agriculture.
620 CKRM: The Voice of Saskatchewn offers both a radio segment and an online January 19, 2026 article by Kevin Hursh featuring Chris Nykolaishen and lightning fertilizer,
The idea of farmers making their own liquid nitrogen fertilizer on-farm with a system called Green Lightning has been around for a few years and it continues to expand.
The Canadian distributor is a family business called Nytro based in Kamsack. Nytro had a booth at the Western Canadian Crop Production Show in Saskatoon [Saskatchewan] last week and will have a booth at Manitoba Ag Days in Brandon [Manitoba] this week.
The Green Lightning theory is the same as how a lightning storm creates some nitrogen that falls with the rain. In this case, electricity is the lightning that produces nitrogen within water. The basic Green Lightning factory has been a six-head unit making 100 gallons a day using about $4 worth of electricity.
A larger, insulated unit within a 10-foot sea can is now available. It can generate 500 gallons of product a day with an electrical cost of $30 to $35 a day.
President of Nytro Chris Nykolaishen says the nitrogen content is equivalent to 3 pounds of N per gallon of water.
“We’ve done replicated plot trials to see if that is an effective rate in which you could use it, and the trials have been positive,” said Nykolaishen, “It’s difficult to measure because of the lack of salt in the product, but we’re using a TDS meter, and with the lab that we use, we’ve developed a formula that you can easily determine the amount of nitrogen you have in the product based on a parts per million basis.”
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Currently, 65 farmers across Canada use the machines, he added.
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Cost is the big driver. The Green Lightning price per pound of nitrogen is far less than conventional fertilizer, even after factoring in the capital cost of the units.
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Weikle’s June 21, 2026 article notes this cautious response from the federal government,
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In an email to CBC, Agriculture and Agri-food Canada (AAFC) said it recognizes innovation will play a role in the future of fertilizer use in Canada, and that plasma-based fertilizers have the potential to improve efficiency and reduce environmental impacts.
“At the same time, conventional fertilizers and manure continue to play a critical and indispensable role in supporting crop production, food security, and farm productivity in Canada,” the email said.
In response to a question about how AAFC will help farmers cope with the current fertilizer shortage, the statement said, in part, that it’s working with partners to “identify supply pressures ahead of the 2027 growing season.”
Stephan Reuter is an assistant professor in physics of plasmas and spectroscopy.
He is also Head of TransMedTech [chair for plasma medicine].
His research involves the interaction of non-thermal plasmas with liquids and diagnostic methods such as ultrafast laser spectroscopy, spectral imaging, and single-shot techniques. Studied application fields are plasmas for medicine, environment, and material synthesis.
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Plasma for Infinitesimal Reactions
Plasma (singular state of the matter, lightning is a common example) are able to generate highly reactive species at low temperature. They are qualified as excited. Generate those reactive species help to induce chemical reactions at low temperature, which couldn’t happen in the wanted conditions. In low-temperature plasma, there are highly reactive species -electrons, and other «cold» molecules. The results are unbalanced medium and a loss in thermodynamic equilibrium.
Thus, it’s possible to create chemical reactions in new media such as microorganisms, living and non-living (nano-scaled structures). More precisely, those researches are focused on the plasma-liquid interfaces of plasma sources.
Nano-magic for lab/living and society
The principal purpose is to advance plasma medicine for diagnostic, medical care, food safety or materials.
According to recent developments in science, Pr Reuter’s approach follows sustainable development principles at the economic scale (positive economic impact), social (health) and environment (responsible plasma sources).
As for TransMedTech, there’s this on its About page,
History
Officially launched in 2017, the Institut TransMedTech (iTMT) is a transdisciplinary open collaboration initiative that aims to develop innovative medical technologies to meet the needs of the healthcare community and train the next generation of the medical technology sector.
The Institut TransMedTech was born of an initiative led by Polytechnique Montréal, with the collaboration of 4 other founding institutions (CHU Sainte-Justine, Université de Montréal, CHUM, Jewish General Hospital of Montreal) and some 30 other partners. Three other institutions joined in 2023: HEC Montréal, the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal (IUGM) and the Montreal Heart Institute (MHI).
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Lightning as fertilizer? What an extraordinary time we live in.
Rice University [Texas, US] researchers are probing the physical limits of excited electronic states called plasmons by studying them in organic molecules with fewer than 50 atoms.
Plasmons are oscillations in the plasma of free electrons that constantly swirl across the surface of conductive materials like metals. In some nanomaterials, a specific color of light can resonate with the plasma and cause the electrons inside it to lose their individual identities and move as one, in rhythmic waves. Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics (LANP) has pioneered a growing list of plasmonic technologies for applications as diverse as color-changing glass, molecular sensing, cancer diagnosis and treatment, optoelectronics, solar energy collection and photocatalysis.
Reporting online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, LANP scientists detailed the results of a two-year experimental and theoretical study of plasmons in three different polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs). Unlike the plasmons in relatively large metal nanoparticles, which can typically be described with classical electromagnetic theory like Maxwell’s [James Clerk Maxwell] equations, the paucity of atoms in the PAHs produces plasmons that can only be understood in terms of quantum mechanics, said study co-author and co-designer Naomi Halas, the director of LANP and the lead researcher on the project.
“These PAHs are essentially scraps of graphene that contain five or six fused benzene rings surrounded by a perimeter of hydrogen atoms,” Halas said. “There are so few atoms in each that adding or removing even a single electron dramatically changes their electronic behavior.”
Halas’ team had experimentally verified the existence of molecular plasmons in several previous studies. But an investigation that combined side by side theoretical and experimental perspectives was needed, said study co-author Luca Bursi, a postdoctoral research associate and theoretical physicist in the research group of study co-designer and co-author Peter Nordlander.
“Molecular excitations are a ubiquity in nature and very well studied, especially for neutral PAHs, which have been considered as the standard of non-plasmonic excitations in the past,” Bursi said. “Given how much is already known about PAHs, they were an ideal choice for further investigation of the properties of plasmonic excitations in systems as small as actual molecules, which represent a frontier of plasmonics.”
Lead co-author Kyle Chapkin, a Ph.D. student in applied physics in the Halas research group, said, “Molecular plasmonics is a new area at the interface between plasmonics and molecular chemistry, which is rapidly evolving. When plasmonics reach the molecular scale, we lose any sharp distinction of what constitutes a plasmon and what doesn’t. We need to find a new rationale to explain this regime, which was one of the main motivations for this study.”
In their native state, the PAHs that were studied — anthanthrene, benzo[ghi]perylene and perylene — are charge-neutral and cannot be excited into a plasmonic state by the visible wavelengths of light used in Chapkin’s experiments. In their anionic form, the molecules contain an additional electron, which alters their “ground state” and makes them plasmonically active in the visible spectrum. By exciting both the native and anionic forms of the molecules and comparing precisely how they behaved as they relaxed back to their ground states, Chapkin and Bursi built a solid case that the anionic forms do support molecular plasmons in the visible spectrum.
The key, Chapkin said, was identifying a number of similarities between the behavior of known plasmonic particles and the anionic PAHs. By matching both the timescales and modes for relaxation behaviors, the LANP team built up a picture of a characteristic dynamics of low-energy plasmonic excitations in the anionic PAHs.
“In molecules, all excitations are molecular excitations, but select excited states show some characteristics that allow us to draw a parallel with the well-established plasmonic excitations in metal nanostructures,” Bursi said.
“This study offers a window on the sometimes surprising behavior of collective excitations in few-atom quantum systems,” Halas said. “What we’ve learned here will aid our lab and others in developing quantum-plasmonic approaches for ultrafast color-changing glass, molecular-scale optoelectronics and nonlinear plasmon-mediated optics.”
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Lifetime dynamics of plasmons in the few-atom limit by Kyle D. Chapkin, Luca Bursi, Grant J. Stec, Adam Lauchner, Nathaniel J. Hogan, Yao Cui, Peter Nordlander, and Naomi J. Halas. PNAS September 11, 2018 115 (37) 9134-9139; published ahead of print August 27, 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1805357115
I have two tidbits about PlasCarb the first being an announcement of its existence and the second an announcement of its recently published research. A Jan. 13, 2015 news item on Nanowerk describes the PlasCarb project (Note: A link has been removed),
The Centre for Process Innovation (CPI) is leading a European collaborative project that aims to transform food waste into a sustainable source of significant economic added value, namely graphene and renewable hydrogen.
The project titled PlasCarb will transform biogas generated by the anaerobic digestion of food waste using an innovative low energy microwave plasma process to split biogas (methane and carbon dioxide) into high value graphitic carbon and renewable hydrogen.
A Jan. 13, 2015 CPI press release, which originated the news item, describes the project and its organization in greater detail,
CPI as the coordinator of the project is responsible for the technical aspects in the separation of biogas into methane and carbon dioxide, and separating of the graphitic carbon produced from the renewable hydrogen. The infrastructure at CPI allows for the microwave plasma process to be trialled and optimised at pilot production scale, with a future technology roadmap devised for commercial scale manufacturing.
Graphene is one of the most interesting inventions of modern times. Stronger than steel, yet light, the material conducts electricity and heat. It has been used for a wide variety of applications, from strengthening tennis rackets, spray on radiators, to building semiconductors, electric circuits and solar cells.
The sustainable creation of graphene and renewable hydrogen from food waste in provides a sustainable method towards dealing with food waste problem that the European Union faces. It is estimated that 90 million tonnes of food is wasted each year, a figure which could rise to approximately 126 million tonnes by 2020. In the UK alone, food waste equates to a financial loss to business of at least £5 billion per year.
Dr Keith Robson, Director of Formulation and Flexible Manufacturing at CPI said, “PlasCarb will provide an innovative solution to the problems associated with food waste, which is one of the biggest challenges that the European Union faces in the strive towards a low carbon economy. The project will not only seek to reduce food waste but also use new technological methods to turn it into renewable energy resources which themselves are of economic value, and all within a sustainable manner.”
PlasCarb will utilise quality research and specialist industrial process engineering to optimise the quality and economic value of the Graphene and hydrogen, further enhancing the sustainability of the process life cycle.
Graphitic carbon has been identified as one of Europe’s economically critical raw materials and of strategic performance in the development of future emerging technologies. The global market for graphite, either mined or synthetic is worth over €10 billion per annum. Hydrogen is already used in significant quantities by industry and recognised with great potential as a future transport fuel for a low carbon economy. The ability to produce renewable hydrogen also has added benefits as currently 95% of hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels. Moreover, it is currently projected that increasing demand of raw materials from fossil sources will lead to price volatility, accelerated environmental degradation and rising political tensions over resource access.
Therefore, the latter stages of the project will be dedicated to the market uptake of the PlasCarb process and the output products, through the development of an economically sustainable business strategy, a financial risk assessment of the project results and a flexible financial model that is able to act as a primary screen of economic viability. Based on this, an economic analysis of the process will be determined. Through the development of a decentralised business model for widespread trans-European implementation, the valorisation of food waste will have the potential to be undertaken for the benefit of local economies and employment. More specifically, three interrelated post project exploitation markets have been defined: food waste management, high value graphite and RH2 sales.
PlasCarb is a 3-year collaborative project, co-funded under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and will further reinforce Europe’s leading position in environmental technologies and innovation in high value Carbon. The consortium is composed of eight partners led by CPI from five European countries, whose complimentary research and industrial expertise will enable the required results to be successfully delivered. The project partners are; The Centre for Process Innovation (UK), GasPlas AS (NO), CNRS (FR), Fraunhofer IBP (DE), Uvasol Ltd (UK), GAP Waste Management (UK), Geonardo Ltd. (HU), Abalonyx AS (NO).
The second announcement can be found in a PlasCarb Jan. 14, 2015 press release announcing the publication of research on heterostructures of graphene ribbons,
Few materials have received as much attention from the scientific world or have raised so many hopes with a view to their potential deployment in new applications as graphene has. This is largely due to its superlative properties: it is the thinnest material in existence, almost transparent, the strongest, the stiffest and at the same time the most strechable, the best thermal conductor, the one with the highest intrinsic charge carrier mobility, plus many more fascinating features. Specifically, its electronic properties can vary enormously through its confinement inside nanostructured systems, for example. That is why ribbons or rows of graphene with nanometric widths are emerging as tremendously interesting electronic components. On the other hand, due to the great variability of electronic properties upon minimal changes in the structure of these nanoribbons, exact control on an atomic level is an indispensable requirement to make the most of all their potential.
The lithographic techniques used in conventional nanotechnology do not yet have such resolution and precision. In the year 2010, however, a way was found to synthesise nanoribbons with atomic precision by means of the so-called molecular self-assembly. Molecules designed for this purpose are deposited onto a surface in such a way that they react with each other and give rise to perfectly specified graphene nanoribbons by means of a highly reproducible process and without any other external mediation than heating to the required temperature. In 2013 a team of scientists from the University of Berkeley and the Centre for Materials Physics (CFM), a mixed CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and UPV/EHU (University of the Basque Country) centre, extended this very concept to new molecules that were forming wider graphene nanoribbons and therefore with new electronic properties. This same group has now managed to go a step further by creating, through this self-assembly, heterostructures that blend segments of graphene nanoribbons of two different widths.
The forming of heterostructures with different materials has been a concept widely used in electronic engineering and has enabled huge advances to be made in conventional electronics. “We have now managed for the first time to form heterostructures of graphene nanoribbons modulating their width on a molecular level with atomic precision. What is more, their subsequent characterisation by means of scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, complemented with first principles theoretical calculations, has shown that it gives rise to a system with very interesting electronic properties which include, for example, the creation of what are known as quantum wells,” pointed out the scientist Dimas de Oteyza, who has participated in this project. This work, the results of which are being published this very week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, therefore constitutes a significant success towards the desired deployment of graphene in commercial electronic applications.
NUKISIMO’s plama and nanotechnology applications? Credit: Shutterstock [downloaded from http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&RCN=36206]
It looks like a jewel, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, there’s no explanation for why this image is offered as an illustration for an Oct. 31, 2013 OORDIS news release (h/t phys.org) about plasma and nanotechnology applications, being worked on as part of the NUSIKIMO (‘Numerical simulations and analysis of kinetic models – applications to plasma physics and nanotechnology’) project,
Plasma is one of the four fundamental states of matter, alongside solid, liquid and gas. Ubiquitous in form, plasma is an ionised gas so energised that electrons have the capacity to break free from their nucleus.
Scientists are keen to shed light on the motion of particles in plasma physics, as well as the dynamics of rarefied gas – a gas whose pressure is much lower than atmospheric pressure. How can this be done? An EU-funded team of researchers has come up with a solution.
Prof. Francis Filbet from Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 in France decided to tackle the question with mathematical and numerical analyses. He received an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant worth almost EUR 500 000 for the NUSIKIMO (‘Numerical simulations and analysis of kinetic models – applications to plasma physics and nanotechnology’) project. Prof Filbet and his research team modelled non-stationary collisional plasma with supercomputers, putting regimes and instabilities under the microscope.
One of the challenges researchers undertook was to approximate kinetic models and to develop novel techniques that could make numerical analysis in kinetic theory possible.
To do this, the team is working on adapting averaging lemmas (proven statements used for obtaining proof of other statements) to examine kinetic equations, including the Boltzmann equation. Devised in 1872, the seven-dimensional equation is used to model the behaviour of gases, but solving it has proved problematic as numerical capabilities fail to capture the complexities involved.
The NUSIKIMO team is also examining asymptotic preserving schemes, which can be described as performant procedures able to solve ‘singularly perturbed problems’ – those for which the character of the problem changes intermittently.
Such problems contain small parameters that cannot be approximated by setting the parameter value to zero. For comparison, an approximation for regular perturbation problems can be obtained when small parameters are set to zero.
Asymptotic preserving schemes were established to help scientists deal with singularly perturbed problems. This is especially the case when they are dealing with kinetic models in a diffusive environment.
Prof. Filbet and his team are developing a method to control numerical entropy (classical thermodynamics) production. Being able to control entropy production, which determines the performance of thermal machines, is an important feature for stability analysis – an assessment that helps us understand what happens to a system when it is perturbed. The researchers believe nonlinear equations could therefore be treated with a strategy based on asymptotic preserving schemes.
Applying these equations to plasma physics is one of the NUSIKIMO goals. The team is evaluating energy transport and seeking to determine the efficiency of plasma heating. The researchers are also looking into the measures required to secure fusion conditions through the interaction of intense, short laser pulses, and schemes like inertial confinement fusion or fast ignition.
Another objective is to apply the equations to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Prof. Filbet and his team are developing theoretical and numerical methods to investigate gaseous and liquid flows in micro devices. The key element here is the development of numerical methods. The researchers say: using numerical methods, rather than analytical methods, make modelling the three-dimensional flow geometries in MEMS configurations possible.
The project end date is December 2013 but in the meantime, you can get more information about NUSIKIMO here.
Non-toxic, inexpensive, and durable are words which, in combination, seem downright magical and all are mentioned in a July 31, 2013 news item on Azonano,
Researchers in the University of Minnesota’s College of Science and Engineering and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., have overcome technical hurdles in the quest for inexpensive, durable electronics and solar cells made with non-toxic chemicals. …
“Imagine a world where every child in a developing country could learn reading and math from a touch pad that costs less than $10 or home solar cells that finally cost less than fossil fuels,” said Uwe Kortshagen, a University of Minnesota mechanical engineering professor and one of the co-authors of the paper.
The July 30, 2013 University of Minnesota news release, which originated the news item, explains the discovery and the issues the researchers are addressing and it mentions, as many do these days, a patent,
The research team discovered a novel technology to produce a specialized type of ink from non-toxic nanometer-sized crystals of silicon, often called “electronic ink.” This “electronic ink” could produce inexpensive electronic devices with techniques that essentially print it onto inexpensive sheets of plastic.
“This process for producing electronics is almost like screen printing a number on a softball jersey,” said Lance Wheeler, a University of Minnesota mechanical engineering Ph.D. student and lead author of the research.
But it’s not quite that easy. Wheeler, Kortshagen and the rest of the research team developed a method to solve fundamental problems of silicon electronic inks.
First, there is the ubiquitous need of organic “soap-like” molecules, called ligands, that are needed to produce inks with a good shelf life, but these molecules cause detrimental residues in the films after printing. This leads to films with electrical properties too poor for electronic devices. Second, nanoparticles are often deliberately implanted with impurities, a process called “doping,” to enhance their electrical properties.
In this new paper, researchers explain a new method to use an ionized gas, called nonthermal plasma, to not only produce silicon nanocrystals, but also to cover their surfaces with a layer of chlorine atoms. This surface layer of chlorine induces an interaction with many widely used solvents that allows production of stable silicon inks with excellent shelf life without the need for organic ligand molecules. In addition, the researchers discovered that these solvents lead to doping of films printed from their silicon inks, which gave them an electrical conductivity 1,000 times larger than un-doped silicon nanoparticle films. The researchers have a provisional patent on their findings.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the published paper,
This video shows how silicon nanocrystals are synthesized in a plasma reactor. Inert argon gas flows from the top of the reactor through a glass tube. Fifteen watts of radio frequency power is applied to the copper ring electrodes to ionize the argon gas and produce what is called a plasma. A gas containing silicon (silane) is injected into the reactive plasma environment to produce silicon nanocrystals. Though the plasma is energetic enough to produce these tiny crystals, the glass tube remains cool enough to touch. The plasma is a reactive environment used to produce silicon nanocrystals that can be applied to inexpensive, next-generation electronics.
![NUKISIMO's plama and nanotechnology applications? Credit: Shutterstock [downloaded from http://cordis.europa.eu/fetch?CALLER=EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&RCN=36206]](http://www.frogheart.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/NUSIKIMO.jpg)