Browse Physics

The next generation of ultrahigh energy lasers will be able to produce extremely dense electron-positron plasmas and intense bursts of gamma rays, according to simulations, and both will lead to new types of experiments.

Plasmas can be made transparent to electromagnetic waves with the application of external magnetic fields.

Radar data confirm that an important mechanism for turbulence in Earth’s auroral plasma can occur naturally.

Experiments show that magnetic waves in a plasma may be effective at controlling energetic electrons.

Dense plasmas created by lasers used for inertial confinement fusion research have been used to extract precise basic nuclear physics data.

Complex structures appear spontaneously in a plasma in a strong magnetic field. The work explores a new regime of plasma behavior that could be relevant for industry and demonstrates a new technique for imaging plasma dynamics.

How a material’s structure affects the conduction of ultrahot electrons is being explored with one of the world’s most powerful lasers.

To create the conditions needed for nuclear fusion, the National Ignition Facility uses high power lasers to generate near solar levels of heat in a pill-size cavity.

A spacecraft has detected unexpectedly high-energy bursts of gamma rays in storm clouds.

Plasma flux ropes, which occur in events like solar flares, have been observed in experiments to bounce off each other instead of merging and annihilating.

Where do cosmic magnetic fields come from?

Plasma chamber offers a laboratory-scale view of magnetic field eruptions on the sun’s surface.

A new phonon mode has been observed in a two-dimensional plasma crystal.

The magnetic field generated by a plasma can lack cylindrical symmetry even when the initial plasma state is perfectly symmetrical.

New satellite measurements may help solve the puzzle of how the sun’s energy heats the corona and solar wind.

The same instability that is observed in hot plasmas, such as those created in spacecraft ion thrusters, is also found in an ultracold xenon plasma.

Plasmas are normally thought of as high temperature ionized gases or fluids, such as those in the sun’s corona or those found in controlled nuclear fusion experiments. Many interesting plasma phenomena can occur, however, in plasmas at low temperature. With the help of laser trapping and cooling, atoms can be photoionized to form neutral plasmas at extremely low temperatures. These plasmas may exist in the so-called strong coupling regime, where the energy of the Coulomb interactions between particles is larger than their thermal energy. In addition to providing a test bed for studying the strongly coupled plasmas such as those found in Jovian planets and white dwarfs, ultracold plasmas play a critical role in understanding the formation of antihydrogen.

Magnetic field lines in moving plasmas can break and reform, releasing large amounts of energy. Simulations suggest this happens in a two stage process—one slow and smooth, the other rapid and chaotic.

Producing terahertz-frequency radiation with a hair-thin, laser-produced plasma could allow for remote illumination and imaging.

Researchers directly measured the time-varying field during a spark-like electrical breakdown that formed a plasma.