Achievements of recent research on electrical discharges and their practical applications in Japan

In recent years, many of the researchers in the field of the discharge-aided environment improvement technology have been published, and it is expected that such a tendency will be continued for a considerable length of time in the future, and many fruitful outcomes are anticipated. It has conventionally been believed that that the understanding of the uses of discharge phenomena has mostly been due to experimental discovery, but in the future there will be accumulation of knowledge by the study of the collision process of electrons, atoms, and molecules. This latter approach has been vigorously promoted in Japan with practical use in mind.