Nuclear and Plasma Physics

Plasma Physics

Plasma is used to describe a comprehensive variety of macroscopically neutral substances containing many interacting free electrons and ionized atoms or molecules, which exhibit collective behavior due to the long-range coulomb forces. Not all media containing charged particles, but can be classified as plasmas. For a group of interacting charged and unbiased particles to reveal plasma behavior it must satisfy certain conditions, or criteria, for plasma existence. Although plasmas in local thermodynamic equilibrium are found in many places in nature, as is the case for many astrophysical types of plasma, they are not very common in the laboratory. Plasmas can also be generated by ionization processes that raise the degree of ionization much above its thermal properties. There are many different methods of creating plasmas in the laboratory and, depending on the method, the plasma may have a high or low density, high or low temperature, it may be steady or transient, stable or unstable, etc.