This is intended to serve as a brief description of my Ph.D. thesis project. I hope to have the full text posted here as well, but that might be a heavy read. This is a work in progress, so new sections will be posted as they are written.

Working Title

Plasma Flows and Electron Heat Transport Driven by Filamentary Pressure Structures

One Sentence Summation

For my thesis in the field of experimental plasma physics I will use an electron beam to generate a hot filament of plasma in the background of a cooler plasma and then study how the energy moves around.

(a) A solid in which the particles are fixed in some particular order. (b) A liquid in which the particles have no particular order and fill the bottom of their container. (c) A gas fills the entire volume of its container.

Plasma

Plasma is sometimes referred to as the fourth state of matter. This is an acceptable definition. Consider a solid material, a block of ice. Heat this ice enough and it will melt into the liquid state. Continue heating this water and it will evaporate into steam, a gas. If we keep heating the gas, then the individual atoms will ionize. This means that the electrons will separate from the nuclei. This resulting mixture of negatively charged electrons and positively charged ions (nuclei) is a plasma.

Expanded view of a single atom and a collection of particles that compose a plasma.

Stars are made out of plasma, including the Sun. That's a good idea of how hot a gas must get before it ionizes. There are simpler examples of plasma, including lightning bolts and fluorescent lights (when they are turned on).

Tags: graduate school, thesis project, experimental plasma physics