plasma-physics

Princeton’s PACMAN AI can control fusion plasma in milliseconds and predict dangerous instabilities before they start. In some fusion energy systems, particles can reach temperatures hotter than the center of the Sun. The challenge is keeping that extreme plasma under control, because disturbances can develop within just a few thousandths of a second, much faster [...]

I am trying to understand how the magnetic moment is invariant in slowly changing magnetic fields. There is a proof in the textbook I am using, but I'm stuck on how $-e\int\frac{\partial B}{\partial t}dS$ becomes $\pi r_{L}|e|\dot{B}$ and how the final $\delta(W_{\perp}/B) = 0$ is obtained. I was thinking of doing some sort of Taylor expansion on the rate of change of B and ignore higher-order te…

In the process of exploring plasmonic systems I have quite often come across the description of cavities as Plasmonic cavities. What is the exact difference between a normal cavity and a plasmonic cavity? Are they both the same? Or is the physics of these two systems quite different?

Scientific Reports, Published online: 06 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41598-026-69623-y CFD-based recurrent neural network modeling of plasma-assisted flow control over a stepped NACA4412 airfoil using LSTM and GRU

Plasmons are quantized oscillations of the charge density in solids, and are found in basically all conducting materials in nature. For light in vacuum, the dispersion relation is required for propagation at $c$ , and you have $\omega=ck$ as a strict relation. For acoustic phonons, you similarly have a linear dispersion relation via Goldstones theorem (with the usual subtleties ). The plasmon how…

Fusion energy, often referred to as an artificial sun, has become a central focus of global sustainable energy development in recent years. However, despite nearly 70 years of worldwide R&D, commercial fusion power remains unrealized. This is primarily due to several critical technical hurdles, including heating plasma to over 100 million°C and maintaining stable long-term operation, deve…

Spacecraft famously have small bits of them disintegrate on reentry. That’s by design, as it is one of the easiest solutions to absorbing the incredible amounts of energy they experience. However, it also results in long turn around times while these heat shields are repaired, and the shields themselves act as “dead weight” limiting payload capacity. With the increased focus on reusable rockets, …

Wafer-edge uniformity in semiconductor etching is a key quality metric directly linked to device yield and is strongly governed by the local sheath structure near the wafer edge-focus ring boundary. However, the relative effects of focus ring geometry, dielectric material, and applied voltage waveform on edge ion transport have not been systematically compared. In this study, a two-dimensional pa…

We’re most familiar with the bright, forking lightning bolts that stretch from thunderstorms toward the ground, but there are even more types of lightning. Pictured here is a gigantic jet, a relatively recently-identified atmospheric phenomenon. Gigantic jets occur when a thunderstorm’s electrical charge escapes upward into the ionosphere in less than a second. The red […]

To elucidate the relationship between electric field and electron-density variations in the high-latitude ionosphere associated with Pc5 ultralow-frequency (ULF) waves from subauroral to high latitudes, we analyzed the global navigation satellite system (GNSS)-total electron content (TEC), ionospheric plasma flow observed by the Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN), and electron density i…

In the world of fusion energy, scientists and engineers study the fourth state of matter known as plasma in an effort to design and build a new type of power plant. Relying on the heat produ

Nature Communications, Published online: 29 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41467-026-76701-2 Lanthanide nanotransducers can convert mid-infrared light into nearinfrared signals but suffer from weak emission. Here, authors couple Nd3 + /Yb3 + -doped nanoparticles with gold nanospheres to achieve silicon-readable detection with seven-fold improvement in specific detectivity relative to the pristine nano…

When I look at the graph, I can find maximum temperature of plasma (roughly 1eV at 10kPa). But you can get a lot hotter with plasma. Please, where is the mistake? See: or See: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Schematic-of-the-electron-and-gas-temperature-as-a-function-of-pressure-in-a-plasma_fig1_3164388 or https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Plot-of-electron-temperature-T-e-and-gas-temperatu…

A kHz laser wakefield accelerator delivered precise electron doses to zebrafish embryos and glioblastoma cells, demonstrating controlled irradiation for future radiobiology studies.

The collective field theory (see nLab for a list of main historical references) which came up as a generalization of the Bohm-Pines method in treating plasma oscillations often used in the study of large N asymptotics (e.g. of matrix models). I have seen few cases where the equations for collective fields are derived; the equations are obtained using approximations and look more systematically un…

Nature, Published online: 25 August 2026; doi:10.1038/d41586-026-02673-4 The push to develop fusion energy, how China is changing the shape of global health and why scientists are putting marmots on OnlyFans.

Linear magnetic holes (LMHs) are localised depressions in the magnetic field magnitude in which the field direction remains nearly unchanged across the structure. Despite their prevalence in in-situ measurements near 1 AU, large-scale statistical investigations remain challenging because of the lack of reproducible and operational automated detection frameworks applicable to extended magnetic-fie…

Some things I understand to be true: When we raise the temperature of a gas to around 10-20,000 Kelvin, the molecules of gas start to ionize, form a plasma, according to the Saha equation. The temperature of a gas relates to the average kinetic energy, which for monotomic molecules, e.g. argon atoms, comprises the translational kinetic energy of the atoms of the gas (cf diatomic molecules, such a…

Nature Physics, Published online: 21 August 2026; doi:10.1038/s41567-026-03410-4 The energy gain of laser wakefield accelerators is tied to the distance over which electrons are accelerated. Now this limitation can be overcome with flying-focus laser pulses, allowing electrons to surf the plasma wave over longer distances.