Up to now, several technological strategies have been pursued to achieve plasma sources that can be either power efficient or reconfigurable or portable or high-density or small (with dimensions down to microns) or, finally, with extended lifetime; unfortunately, each strategy allows for just a few of the above-mentioned goals. PATH lays the foundation of a new line of technology, i.e. the design and fabrication of a plasma source that pushes the limit of Hollow cathode discharges and radio frequency sources as a breakthrough in the field. To tackle the drawbacks that come from each distinct plasma source, plasma physics, plasma technology, electromagnetics, and material manufacturing experts combined and are combining their expertise to advance science and technology for innovative navigation and telecommunication antenna systems.
The specific technological breakthrough, ensuring reliability at high frequencies and fast tunability rates, is of paramount importance to address the requirements of the future information society, especially in the areas of security and safety and in critical applications. Therefore, we expect this technology to have a huge social and economic impact, as it will affect many application fields, such as telecommunications and navigation (compact antennas and EM shields, multi-/narrow-/broad-band, reconfigurable, electronically steerable, jamming resistant), information and communication technologies (antennas embedded in internal/external surface of buildings, cars, aircrafts, mobile phones or wearable tissues open new horizons allowing high data rate interlink communication between users), aerospace, aviation and ground transportation, consumer electronics and health, driven by a major innovation in the physical layer of the future RF, microwave, and mm-wave systems. Potential barriers may be expected in the industrial costs for high rate mass market production that may limit the use of this technology to high level professional and safety critical applications.
Apart from the specific telecommunications sector, progress of plasma sources beyond the state of art will impact a larger field as plasma sources are used in many different fields from industry to space.
