Undergraduate Physics Seminar: "From Semiconductor Manufacturing to Spacecraft Propulsion Research: Applications of Plasma Physics," Sebastian Rojas Barragan

Plasma and charged-particle systems sit at the heart of next-generation electric propulsion, precision manufacturing, and spacecraft survivability, yet each application still faces a fundamental gap between what has been demonstrated in the lab and what is actually flying or available today. This talk presents four such gaps and UIUC research work toward closing them.

Multimode propulsion, despite being studied extensively on paper, has never actually been demonstrated in orbit, and our redesign of the AFET-2 electrospray thruster for the MonARCH CubeSat mission is aimed at producing one of the first flight-viable systems capable of operating on a shared monopropellant across chemical and electrospray modes, built on the principles of Taylor cone formation and field-driven ion/droplet extraction from the propellant meniscus.

In parallel, EUV lithography research is almost entirely inaccessible outside industry, with only a small handful of university-scale EUV sources existing worldwide; we present the characterization of one of these rare systems, including dose stability, debris-driven filter lifetime, and photoresist response.

Additionally, conventional hollow cathodes rely on heated inserts to sustain electron emission, adding mass, warm-up time, and a hard lifetime limit set by insert depletion. These constraints make them a poor fit for small, low-power spacecraft. We are developing a heaterless, insertless hollow cathode intended to remove both of these failure points for low-power gridded ion thrusters, studying the hollow cathode effect and glow-to-arc transition to sustain a discharge via field and secondary electron emission alone.

Finally, as CubeSats increasingly operate in the plasma-dense LEO environment, how that ambient plasma interacts with and degrades spacecraft surfaces remains a largely open problem, one we are beginning to investigate as the next phase of my research with EPlab.

Across all four efforts, my work has focused on the same thing: taking plasma-based technologies that exist only as isolated demonstrations or open-ended problems, and pushing them toward functional hardware through a better understanding of the physical principles behind them.

Join via Zoom: https://illinois.zoom.us/j/84466699377?pwd=PoAMbQGYd24NS2AuwwvYgh1i3Iuvfg.1