The premier plasma physics event of the year, the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics Annual Meeting is now upon us. Normally this would mean jet lag, hoppy American beers, AirBnBs in dodgy parts of town and far too much cheap conference coffee.
We’ve got a new paper out, based on some work done at MAGPIE shortly before I left. Instead of using the full one million amps to drive something using MAGPIE, we used a smaller pulsed-power device to produce a plume of plasma using a ‘plasma gun’.
The Aurora is one of the most beautiful phenomena in the solar system, and it is intrinsically linked to an elegant and ubiquitous process called Magnetic Reconnection.
In my last blog post I discussed measuring the temperature of a plasma. I talked about firing an intense laser…
Plasmas tend to be quite hot. This is because they consist of electrons and ions, which are strongly attracted to…