This book is based on a series of lectures delivered by the author over a ten year period at the Moscow Power-Engineer­ ing Institute to technology and chemistry undergraduates not specializing in physics. The book aims at providing a concise yet general description of the physics of weakly ionized plasma so that a budding engineer or chemist can obtain a general understanding of the phenomena occurring in the plasma of a laboratory setting. This understanding is necessary since low-temperature plasma is increasingly used in technology.

The character of the book’s intended readership demands that the mathematics of the book be relatively unsophisticat­ ed. The author believes that the purpose of this book cannot be achieved merely by including descriptive material and formulas without derivation. This approach can hardly contribute to understanding the subject since the student cannot see all the conditions providing for the validity of the result. We use another approach. The book extensively employs various evaluative techniques, which show the dependence of the result on the parameters of the problem and give its value within order of magnitude. Moreover, for some functions only their limiting values are determined or simple assumptions are made to find these functions. These methods yield a correct qualitative picture of the subject and considerably simplify the discussion. However, the simplicity of discussion is essentially thought-provoking and creates a profound understanding of the subject.

The amount of the material used in the book and the form of its presentation were chosen to provide engineering stu­ dents with the general knowledge of the fundamentals of the plasma physics, which they will need when working with plasma-containing systems.

The reader is assumed to know the material given in a basic course of general college physics. The choice of prob­lems and their treatment in the book were to some extent prompted by the author’s experience in the applied plasma research.

A list of literature for further reading is given at the end of the book.