Plasma
Plasma is essentially ionized gas in which each of the molecules lost an electron. This can happen in nature in the forms of lightning or on the surface of the sun as examples, but it can also be artificially induced using electric fields or other methods for example. Plasma is one of the four fundamentals states of matter and it behaves very differently from the other states.
The Main Idea
It is a state of matter that is essentially electrically neutral as where there are unbound protons and electrons that still experience forces. The force exerted on them creates movement and therefore temperature, so plasma does have current, electric fields and so on so forth. Most commonly, plasma is formed when all the molecules in a gas lose an electron. This interaction occurs continuously in and on the sun.
Connectedness
Plasma is very cool, because it truly is very foreign to us without it actually being that foreign. We don't think we encounter this state of matter on a regular basis but gases transition into a plasma state in several industrial applications. In my field, the aerospace engineering field, we encounter plasma in the use of a Hall effect thruster, where ion are expelled to drive the vehicle forward.
History
It was originally discovered by Sir William Crookes. He discovered the foreign matter by chance in a Crookes tube experiment. The name "plasma" was not used until 1928, when Irving Langmuir, an American chemist and physician coined it as such, as the glowing matter discharge looked a lot like the shape of a Crookes tube; the origin of the word is a Greek word, πλάσμα, meaning "anything formed", like the discharge that took on the shape of the tube.
See also
Further reading
Wikipedia
External links
References
- Chabay & Sherwood: Matters and Interactions -- Modern Mechanics Volume 1, 4th Edition
- Luo, Q-Z; D'Angelo, N; Merlino, R. L. (1998)
Category: Main Paige: [Properties of Matter]