A
"plasma physicist" is a scientist who studies a unique state of matter called plasma. Plasma is a superheated gas that exists when atoms or molecules have lost some of their electrons. These scientists explore the properties, behavior, and applications of plasma, which is widely found in stars, lightning, and has various uses in technology and energy research.
Full definition
However the failure of big fusion could just add to the technology's stigma, as well as cut off the supply
of plasma physicists coming through our universities.
That time scale of a few minutes fits well with models of the circuit's behavior,
says plasma physicist Goran Marklund of the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.
Francis «Rip» William Perkins Jr., a
pioneering plasma physicist whose contributions to the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) ranged from seminal advances in fusion energy and astrophysical research to the education of a generation of scientists, died on July 26 in Boulder, Colo..
The earnest, freshly minted Ph.D. was teamed up
with plasma physicist Carreras, a sharp - tongued Spaniard who was one of the lab's most distinguished scientists.
Two
young plasma physicists at Chalmers University of Technology have now taken us one step closer to a functional fusion reactor.
«They are where they are because people are able to believe they can get a [hydrogen - boron] reactor to work,» says
plasma physicist David Hammer of Cornell University, also a Tri Alpha adviser.
Storms on the sun catapult charged particles into space at tremendous speeds, says
plasma physicist Ruth Bamford of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England.
But burning hydrogen - boron fuel requires truly enormous temperatures, more than 3 billion degrees Celsius, and that will be «very challenging,» says
plasma physicist Jon Menard of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in New Jersey, who is not involved in the project.
2 Fusion On
Tap Plasma physicist Eric Lerner has a dream: a form of nuclear energy so clean it generates no radioactive waste, so safe it can be located in the heart of a city, and so inexpensive it provides virtually unlimited power for the dirt - cheap price of $ 60 per kilowatt — far below the $ 1,000 - per - kilowatt cost of electricity from natural gas.
Plasma physicist Michael Keidar, director of the George Washington Institute for Nanotechnology in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues have a five - year, $ 445,000 grant to investigate the physical effects of plasma on the body.
Ma is an experimental
plasma physicist in inertial confinement fusion and high energy density physics.
Ronald C. Davidson, a pioneering
plasma physicist for 50 years who directed the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) during a crucial period of its history and was a founding director of the Plasma Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), passed away on May 19 at his home in Cranbury, New Jersey, due to complications from pneumonia.
An aerospace engineer and
plasma physicist by training, he is one of the nation's foremost experts on energy technology, nuclear arms control and nonproliferation, and global environmental change.
«I love telling mind - blowing facts, like every time we do a shot at NIF, we are one of the hottest places in the solar system,» said experimental
plasma physicist Tammy Ma (NIF implosions reach peak temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Centigrade — more than five times hotter than the core of the Sun).
The experiment is an example of laboratory astrophysics, a rapidly growing area of high energy density physics that requires the collaboration of astrophysicists,
experimental plasma physicists and computational physicists.
A device based on a 100 - PW laser could be at least 10 times shorter and cheaper than the roughly $ 10 billion machine now envisaged, says Stuart Mangles,
a plasma physicist at Imperial College London.
The data may be quite important for another reason, says Philippe Escoubet,
a plasma physicist at the European Space Agency (ESA) in Noordwijk, Netherlands.
More than a decade ago the U.S. Navy explored plasma antenna technology, recalls Wally Manheimer,
a plasma physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory.
Director Holzworth is
a plasma physicist who is interested in what happens in the outer edges of the atmosphere.
James Chen,
a plasma physicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., says that predicting the future might not be so simple.
About 15 % of the spending would go to «basic physics in space,» says Zelenyi,
a plasma physicist.
Plasma physicists and engineers want the plasma to be under as much magnetic pressure as possible, because high pressure means that the plasma particles are interacting more frequently, increasing both the chances that fusion reactions will occur and the amount of heat produced by the tokamak.
In his new design, Oleg Batishchev,
a plasma physicist at MIT, instead uses electromagnetic waves to ionize a gas into plasma that is ejected to provide a little rocket blast.
«We don't claim to have a solution for the mystery of ball lightning,» says study coauthor Alexander Kendl,
a plasma physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria.
Making the device truly portable is a big advance, says Michael Keidar,
a plasma physicist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. «Operating cold plasma in air is challenging, [and] it seems like they were able to make it work,» he says.
We didn't start with graphite or any pure carbon material,» said Siegfried Glenzer,
a plasma physicist from SLAC and a co-author of the paper.
Speaking at a Ronald E. Hatcher Science on Saturday lecture on March 5 at the DOE's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), Synakowski traced the discoveries that have led to this moment as well as his own personal journey as
a plasma physicist.