A team of engineering professors from the University of Michigan have created a plasma jet wand that they believe could quickly and easily disinfect hospital rooms. The ion-emitting device looks something like a Ghostbusters’ proton packs, and its plasma beam can destroy bacteria and viruses in just seconds.
The device produces plasma by running a gas, like air, through a high electric field, which rips electrons off of atoms to tear molecules apart. That creates what the University of Michigan team describes as a soup of charged atoms and molecule fragments. The oxygen-based ions in the plasma then destroy bacteria and viruses by pulling carbon out of their cell walls or protein casings.