This project has a long tail.
The first version started around 2012, just after my PhD, when I began upgrading my tungsten-carbon deposition device toward boron-film deposition. The idea was to sputter boron powder in plasma and use it as a practical laboratory route to boron-containing coatings. I worked on it for a couple of months, then moved on to other projects, while the old laboratory continued the direction and later did substantial work on boron irradiation.
The project came back strongly around 2024, after I attended an ITER DivSOL meeting where boron was again a central subject: boronization, boron powder, wall conditioning, and plasma-facing surfaces. By then my own setup had also matured. The vacuum system, plasma-source experience, diagnostics, and surface-analysis plans were no longer just pieces on a bench. They were enough to restart the boron work properly.
So I bought boron powder, built a new plasma source, and began depositing boron films again. The device is not a fixed commercial instrument, and it is not a one-off prototype. It is a research apparatus: always evolving, always being improved, and already producing useful results.
The scientific target is the surface itself. In fusion devices, boron is not just "a coating." It reacts with oxygen, hydrogen, carbon, and the substrate; it changes under plasma exposure; and its usefulness depends on exactly that messy plasma-wall chemistry. A laboratory boron source lets us create those surfaces deliberately, expose them under known conditions, and then measure what actually happened.
Several master theses have already grown from this work. The project now connects an old post-PhD idea with a current fusion-materials problem: controlled boron-film deposition as a route into in-situ studies of plasma-facing surface chemistry.
