Cold plasma in the nanotechnology of catalysts

In the paper the preparation of catalysts with the use of cold plasmas is discussed. A special attention is focused on nanocatalysts. In general, there are three main trends in this field: (1) plasma enhanced preparation of "classical" catalysts, (2) plasma sputtering of catalytically active compounds, especially metal and metal oxide nanoparticles, and (3) plasma-enhanced metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (PEMOCVD) of very thin metal and metal oxide films with specific nanostructure. It is shown that the cold plasma techniques are very effective methods for designing the nanocatalysts with distinct and tunable chemical activity, specificity and selectivity. Finally, our preliminary investigations concerning CoO_X catalytic films fabricated by the PEMOCVD method are presented.