A waveguide in a femtosecond laser system.
NSF
Because of a series of accidental turns in my career, I have more than a passing interest in plasma physics and in making those plasmas glow very bright. It's kind of odd, but plasmas were a really hot topic fifty or more years ago because they were shiny and new. Now it feels a bit back-to-the-future-ish to be taking an interest in a field that was until recently mostly populated by people nearing retirement.
There are a couple of reasons for the renewed interest, though: first, we have new ways of generating very hot plasmas. Lasers that emit very short pulses with very high intensity have given us new tools to explore the world of plasma physics. Concurrent to that, there seems to be renewed interest in doing experiments with soft X-Rays (light in the wavelength range of 1-50nm). These desires have come together in an unholy union to produce some of the biggest, baddest laser experiments you will ever meet.
Plasmas: How do they work?
A plasma is a very funny beast. At first blush, a plasma is similar to a gas: it is compressible, it flows, and it will even obey the ideal gas law to some extent. But a plasma is a mixture of charged particles: positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons floating around free as the birds. This means that when electric and magnetic fields are applied, a plasma behaves very differently from a gas. A plasma can be trapped and compressed by electromagnetic fields. Since we can generate vast electric and magnetic fields, very high temperatures and pressures can be reached.
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