Prof. Elizabeth Paul explains the importance of plasma in fusion energy research.
Transcript
Understanding the universe means understanding plasma. It is extremely abundant in the universe — stars are made of plasma, lightning is plasma, and the matter between galaxies and galaxy clusters is plasma. Plasma is sometimes called the fourth state of matter: solid, liquid, gas, then plasma. If you take a gas and start heating it up, eventually the electrons will get stripped off of the atoms, creating a state of matter different from a gas because it can interact with electric and magnetic fields. This means there are different classes of waves that can interact with the plasma. For fusion, we use magnetic fields to confine the plasma, using that state of matter to our advantage.