Antoine Salden

• PhD student
• University of Trento

Ciao, my name is Antoine a physicist hailing from the Netherlands but currently living in the beautiful city of Trento in Italy and enrolled in the PIONEER project. During my Bachelor and Master degrees at the University of Eindhoven (TU/e) I discovered both my interest in the physics of plasmas as well as my passion for investigating them in a laboratory. After a brief foray in nuclear fusion research during my Bachelor degree, I found an exciting project at the Plasma and Material Processing group of the TU/e during my Masters. I got involved with studying the dissociation of CO2 in a plasma environment using laser based techniques, by utilizing the phenomenon of Laser Induced Fluorescence. For this research topic I spent a lot of time fiddling in the lab to try to reconcile practical experimental considerations with the actual science that we were striving to perform. Along the way, I found my passion in this way of working as it allowed me to investigate not only the physics but allowed me to also explore, optimize and improve. During a beautiful afternoon enjoying the sun on an afternoon in April (a rarity in the Netherlands!) I was informed of an opportunity to pursue my research further within the PIONEER program. The rest, as they say, is history. My work now involves investigating the time evolution of the cocktail of (excited) states that occur in a CO2 conversion plasma that is pulsed with a nanosecond duration with spectroscopic techniques.