Power Beams

Sustainable growth in human civilization has been made possible due to new and innovative technologies that have enabled man to cross physical and technological barriers. With energy and materials sectors as the key drivers. twentieth century society saw exotic inventions in physics like Lasers, plasmas and particle beams (power beams) that changed the entire facet of scientific approach to scale the unachievable. Power beams are concentrated energy flux (CEF) sources of plasma, laser, electron and other particle beams with power densities of giga to tera watts per meter2 . The availability of extremely high energy flux focused to less than a mm of spot, high temperatures, large gradients, extremely narrow pulse widths and highly reactive species are the major assets which enable:

    (a) processing in non equilibrium regime
    (b) extremely fine processing scales
    (c) high specificity as well as selectivity.


In addition, the beam processes are eco-friendly. The twenty-first century is poised to see large scale adaptation of power beams in to the industrial scenario.