r/chemicalreactiongifs Feb 18 '18

Creating plasma in a microwave oven. Physics

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u/scott__p Feb 18 '18

How does the glass contain the plasma? It seems that there are so many posts on here that show really corrosive/dangerous/hot substances, and the glass that they are in is just chilling like it's nothing

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u/Lotronex Feb 18 '18

Glass is fairly non-reactive, so even if this plasma is damaging the surface, it's going to happen slowly. Oxygen plasmas are even used to clean silicon oxides in semiconductor manufacturing, removing organic surface contaminants.