Tag: plasma physics
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Ball lightning’s dirty secret is dirt
Ball lightning is weird: a spherical glowing object that zooms horizontally at a fast rate before vanishing. (I wonder how many UFO sightings are ball lightning.) It’s a rare phenomenon — far more so than ordinary lightning — so nobody had been able to measure its properties with scientific equipment until now. As it happened,…
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Accelerating neutral particles on a lab bench
Most accelerators, including the big ones at CERN and RHIC, use charged particles: protons, electrons, or ions (atoms with electrons removed to make them positively charged). That’s because it’s easy to accelerate that kind of particle using electric and magnetic fields. However, neutral particles like neutrons or normal atoms can’t be accelerated by those fields,…
Bowler Hat Science 