In recent years, non-thermal plasma (NTP) application in agriculture is rapidly increasing. Many published articles and reviews in the literature are focus on the post-harvest use of plasma in agriculture. However, the pre-harvest application of plasma still in its early stage. Therefore, in this review, we covered the effect of NTP and plasma-treated water (PTW) on seed germination and growth enhancement. Further, we will discuss the change in biochemical analysis, e.g., the variation in phytohormones, phytochemicals, and antioxidant levels of seeds after treatment with NTP and PTW. Lastly, we will address the possibility of using plasma in the actual agriculture field and prospects of this technology.

We have studied the effects of air nonthermal plasma irradiation of seeds of Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) on their growth from the beginning of cultivation to their harvest. Three minute plasma irradiation of dry seeds resulted in growth acceleration in all the growth stages. Compared with the control, the plasma irradiation led to an 11% shorter harvest period, a 56% increase in total seed weight, a 12% increase in each seed weight, and a 39% increase in seed number.

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Growth processes of clusters in low-pressure and low-power silane radio frequency discharges are studied by using the newly developed double-pulse-discharge method which realizes in situ measurement of their size and density in a size range of 0.5–4 nm. The clusters begin to be composed of two size groups at about 10 ms after the discharge initiation: clusters in the small size group have an almost constant average size of about 0.5 nm through the discharge period, while those in the large one grow at about 4 nm/s in a monodisperse way. Time evolution of the measured average sizes and densities in the groups is transformed into that of size distributions assuming that the density of SinHx clusters for the small group decreases exponentially with the increase in the number of Si atoms, n, of them, and the size distribution for the large group is the lognormal one. The results show that a critical cluster size for nucleation is SinHx (n∼4).

As the finalization of the hydrogen experiment towards the deuterium phase, the exploration of the best performance of the hydrogen plasma was intensively performed in the Large Helical Device (LHD). High ion and electron temperatures, Ti, Te, of more than 6 keV were simultaneously achieved by superimposing the high power electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECH) on the neutral beam injection (NBI) heated plasma. Although flattening of the ion temperature profile in the core region was observed during the discharges, one could avoid the degradation by increasing the electron density. Another key parameter to present plasma performance is an averaged beta value . The high regime around 4 % was extended to an order of magnitude lower than the earlier collisional regime. Impurity behaviour in hydrogen discharges with NBI heating was also classified with the wide range of edge plasma parameters. Existence of no impurity accumulation regime where the high performance plasma is maintained with high power heating > 10 MW was identified. Wide parameter scan experiments suggest that the toroidal rotation and the turbulence are the candidates for expelling impurities from the core region.

The effects of gas temperature gradient, pulse discharge modulation, and hydrogen dilution on the growth of particles below about 10 nm in size in silane parallel-plate RF discharges are studied using a high-sensitivity photon-counting laser-lightscattering (PCLLS) method. Thermophoretic force due to the gas temperature gradient between the electrodes drives neutral particles above a few nm in size toward the cool RF electrode which is at room temperature. Pulse discharge modulation is much more effective in reducing the particle density when it is combined with the gas temperature gradient, and particles above a few nm in size cannot be detected by the PCLLS method even after 2 h. Hydrogen dilution of a high H 2 /SiH 4 concentration ratio above about 5 is also useful in suppressing particle growth in the radical production region around the plasma/sheath boundary near the RF electrode.

A laser-light-scattering (LLS) method for measuring the size and density of nanoparticles generated in reactive plasmas has been developed. The size and density of the nanoparticles are determined from their thermal coagulation that takes place after turning off the discharge. The measurable size and density range of the LLS method is np⪆1013(m−3∕2)×dp−5∕2L−2ng−1, where np, dp, L, and ng are the density, size, and diffusion length of the nanoparticles, and the density of a background gas, respectively. The method has been demonstrated by measurement of the size and density of nanoparticles formed by the radio-frequency discharge of dimethyldimethoxysilane Si(CH3)2(OCH3)2 diluted with Ar. Using a simple optical setup for the LLS measurement, nanoparticles are detected down to ≈1nm in size when they are generated at a density of ≈1012cm−3. The developed method is widely applicable to other systems in which thermal coagulation takes place.