Low temperature atmospheric pressure plasma sources for microbial decontamination

The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of plasma sources at atmospheric pressure used for microbicidal treatment. In order to consider the interdisciplinary character of this topic an introduction and definition of basic terms and procedures are given for plasma as well as for microbicidal issues. The list of plasma sources makes no claim to be complete, but to represent the main principles of plasma generation at atmospheric pressure and to give an example of their microbicidal efficiency. The interpretation of the microbicidal results remain difficult due to the non-standardized methods used by different authors and due to the fact that small variations in the setup can change the results dramatically.