http://www.physorg.com/physics-news/plasma/ en-us PhysOrg Team PhysOrg.com provides the latest news on physics of plasma If you keep twisting a straight elastic string, at some moment it starts kinking in a wild way. Something similar occurs when one increases the electrical current flowing in a magnetized plasma doughnut: it takes on a wild helical shape, which spoils its performance. This phenomenon concerns scientists exploring fusion power, who use powerful magnetic fields to confine plasma during their experiments. http://www.physorg.com/news176402729.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-11-02T20:20:02-07:00 In the quest to produce nuclear fusion energy, researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility have recently confirmed long-standing theoretical predictions that performance, efficiency and reliability are simultaneously obtained in tokamaks, the leading magnetic confinement fusion device, operating at their performance limits. Experiments designed to test these predictions have successfully demonstrated the interaction of these conditions. http://www.physorg.com/news176402578.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-11-02T17:30:03-07:00 Particle accelerators are among the largest and most expensive scientific instruments. Thirty years ago, theorists John Dawson and Toshiki Tajima proposed an idea for making them thousands of times smaller: surf the particles on plasma waves driven by short intense laser pulses. Since plasmas are free of the damage limits of conventional accelerators, much larger fields can be built up within such waves, enabling much smaller accelerators. http://www.physorg.com/news176402686.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-11-02T17:20:01-07:00 Using Einstein's theory of special relativity to speedup computer simulations, scientists have designed laser-plasma accelerators with energies of 10 billion electron volts (GeV) and beyond. These systems, which have not been simulated in detail until now, could in the future serve as a compact new technology for particle colliders and energetic light sources. http://www.physorg.com/news176382250.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-11-02T11:04:53-07:00 For years scientists have struggled with the difficult physics of inertial confinement fusion. This is the attempt to compress a target capsule containing isotopes of hydrogen with high-powered lasers to high enough pressure and temperature to initiate fusion burn. http://www.physorg.com/news175958305.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-10-28T20:20:01-07:00 Most schoolchildren learn that everything in the universe is a solid, a liquid or a gas. But those lessons miss the fourth and by far most common state of matter: plasma. http://www.physorg.com/news175855071.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-10-27T09:39:39-07:00 Imagine yourself at the core of Jupiter, a planet 300 times the mass of Earth. At 35,000 degrees Fahrenheit, you and I might think it's hot in here, but to a physicist it's merely warm - warm dense matter, to be precise, stuff that hasn't quite undergone thermonuclear fusion yet. http://www.physorg.com/news174914869.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-10-16T12:28:31-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- A team of European researchers has demonstrated some of the first commercially viable plasmonic devices, paving the way for a new era of high-speed communications and computing in which electronic and optical signals can be handled simultaneously. http://www.physorg.com/news174907144.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-10-16T10:21:05-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- The U.S. ITER Project Office at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has awarded two contracts totaling $33.6 million for 8,270 km of niobium tin strand and 4,795 km of copper strand for the Toroidal Field Conductor, a major component of U.S. contributions to the ITER Project. ITER's Toroidal Field Magnets will fill the plasma volume (~1000 cubic meters) with a magnetic field roughly 100,000 times the Earth's magnetic field. http://www.physorg.com/news173980230.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-10-05T17:10:16-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- UC San Diego researchers are using `star` power to help ignite the field of fusion, which is being looked at as a future reliable green energy source. Under a new $5.8 million five-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, UCSD will host and lead the new Center for Momentum Transport and Flow Organization in Plasmas and Magnetofluids, which will bring together astrophysical and magnetic fusion theorists, experimentalists and computationalists from multiple institutions. http://www.physorg.com/news171898294.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-09-11T14:40:01-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Just as health-food manufacturers work on developing the best possible sodium substitutes for low-salt diets, physicists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology have acquired new knowledge on a promising sodium alternative of their own. Sodium-like tungsten ions could pepper -- and conveniently monitor -- the hot plasma soup inside fusion energy devices, potential sources of abundant, clean power. http://www.physorg.com/news171650049.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-09-08T17:35:05-07:00 Using one of the greatest sources of radiation energy created by man, University of Nevada, Reno researcher and faculty member Roberto Mancini is studying ultra-high temperature and non-equilibrium plasmas to mimic what happens to matter in accretion disks around black holes. http://www.physorg.com/news171125659.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-09-02T15:54:54-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the University of Warwick have found what could be the signal of ideal wave "surfing" conditions for individual particles within the massive turbulent ocean of the solar wind. The discovery could give a new insight into just how energy is dissipated in solar system sized plasmas such as the solar wind and could provide significant clues to scientists developing fusion power which relies on plasmas. http://www.physorg.com/news170947797.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-08-31T14:30:59-07:00 Though it looks like a tiny purple blowtorch, a pencil-sized plume of plasma on the tip of a small probe remains at room temperature as it swiftly dismantles tough bacterial colonies deep inside a human tooth. But it's not another futuristic product of George Lucas' imagination. It's the exciting work of USC School of Dentistry and Viterbi School of Engineering researchers looking for new ways to safely fight tenacious biofilm infections in patients - and it could revolutionize many facets of medicine. http://www.physorg.com/news163903949.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-06-11T01:53:16-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- On the nanoscale, things aren`t always what they seem. What first looked like a continuous plasma jet has turned out to be a train of tiny, high-velocity plasma bullets. Using a camera with an exposure time of a few nanoseconds, researchers have further investigated the plasma bullets, and have even found a way to control them. http://www.physorg.com/news154951518.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-02-27T10:07:38-07:00 Several years after Duke University researchers announced spectacular behavior of a low density ultracold gas cloud, researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory have observed strikingly similar properties in a very hot and dense plasma "fluid" created to simulate conditions when the universe was about one millionths of a second old. http://www.physorg.com/news153928950.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-02-15T14:03:22-07:00 (PhysOrg.com) -- By integrating a solid-state electron emitter and a microcavity plasma device, researchers at the University of Illinois have created a plasma transistor that could be used to make lighter, less expensive and higher resolution flat-panel displays. http://www.physorg.com/news152973325.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2009-02-04T12:36:20-07:00 Astronomers are recruiting the physics laboratory to unravel the high energy processes involved in formation of stars and other critical processes within the universe. Experiments with high energy radiation and plasmas in the laboratory involving temperatures and magnetic fields over a million times greater than normally encountered on earth are also producing spin off benefits for important applications, notably in the drive towards nuclear fusion as a source of clean carbon-neutral energy. http://www.physorg.com/news148315822.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2008-12-12T14:50:22-07:00 University of British Columbia researchers have developed a technique that brings scientists a big step closer to unlocking the secrets of the most abundant form of matter in the universe. http://www.physorg.com/news146496972.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2008-11-21T13:36:12-07:00 Since their development in the 1940s, transistors have been at the heart of computers and other modern electronic devices. Transistors - whose job is to start, stop, or amplify electric current - come in all shapes, sizes and materials, depending on the application. Recently, scientists have fabricated a new variation: a micro-sized plasma transistor. http://www.physorg.com/news145705718.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2008-11-12T09:48:38-07:00 Flying saucers may soon be more fact than mere science fiction. University of Florida mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Subrata Roy has submitted a patent application for a circular, spinning aircraft design reminiscent of the spaceships seen in countless Hollywood films. Roy, however, calls his design a "wingless electromagnetic air vehicle," or WEAV. http://www.physorg.com/news132405698.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2008-06-11T12:21:38-07:00 A University of Michigan professor has taken a step toward simulating a type of matter found in the crusts of neutron stars, in the cores of gas giant planets, and in exotic plasmas thought to be present in the earliest universe. http://www.physorg.com/news129302578.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2008-05-06T14:22:58-07:00 Streams of granular particles bouncing off a target in a simple tabletop experiment produce liquid-like behavior also witnessed in a massive research apparatus that simulates the birth of the universe. A team led by the University of Chicago's Sidney Nagel and Heinrich Jaeger report this surprising finding in the Oct. 27-Nov. 2 issue of Physical Review Letters. http://www.physorg.com/news113590164.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2007-11-06T16:49:24-07:00 Researchers at the University of Warwick`s Physics Department`s Centre for Fusion, Space and Astrophysics have found a powerful technique that could be used to detect precisely when ordered patterns form in everything from plasma in the solar wind and fusion reactors, to crowds of people, or flocks of birds. The technique could even be used to find unusual patterns in stock market behaviour. http://www.physorg.com/news105886375.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2007-08-09T13:52:55-07:00 A project by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has come one step closer to making fusion energy possible. http://www.physorg.com/news92671947.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2007-03-09T14:12:27-07:00 Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), in Laurel, Md., in conjunction with scientists from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the U.S. Air Force Academy, have developed a tiny analyzer to study depletions of plasma (known as plasma bubbles) in the ionosphere, a phenomenon that can disrupt satellite communications. http://www.physorg.com/news92667195.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2007-03-09T12:53:15-07:00 The Air Force Research Laboratory is laying the groundwork to develop revolutionary hypersonic aerospace vehicles. AFRL is examining the feasibility of replacing traditional mechanical actuators, which move to control an air vehicle's flight control surfaces like wing flaps, with plasma actuators that require no moving parts and are more reliable. http://www.physorg.com/news65074592.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2006-04-24T05:16:32-07:00 Recently, new viral-based infectious diseases such as SARS (corona viruses) and avian influenza (orthomyxoviruses) have made their appearance, and cases that threaten human health are on the increase. In seeking new technologies for purifying the air, Sharp has systematically verified the efficacy of Plasmacluster IonsTM in deactivating harmful substances that are the cause of illnesses spread through the medium of the air. http://www.physorg.com/news548.html Physics - Plasma Physics 2004-07-28T09:23:46-07:00