Posted 02.16.2012 at 5:10 pm
5 Comments
Kink Instability in Argon Plasma
A. L. Moser and P. M. Bellan, Caltech
Instability begets instability. At least, that’s the lesson learned from a couple of Caltech researchers studying the way magnetic field lines break and reconnect. Such magnetic breakage and reconnection at some scales can be quite violent, like when the sun’s magnetic field lines snap and toss off a coronal mass ejection. But at smaller scales, it just looks really cool.
There’s a ton of cool science behind this video that won’t be expounded upon in detail here, but suffice it to say that the researchers decided the best way to observe the corkscrewing effect that occurs when plasmas shed their electrons, creating a magnetic field that then acts on the plasma (this phenomenon is known as kink instability) was to fire some jets of super-hot, 20,000-degrees-Kelvin plasmas across a 20 centimeter gap in a vacuum and film it with a microsecond camera. In doing so, they discovered that kink instability actually spawns another phenomenon called Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
That’s two instabilities for the price of one jet of superhot argon plasma, which is what you’re looking at in the video below. Click through to Caltech to see just how kinky this plasma phenomena can be.
[Caltech]
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this might just be head tiltingly kinky!
to mars or bust!
Weapons here we come.
If they simply looked at *basic* plasma physics, they would see that there's no such thing as "magnetic reconnection."
There is simply electric current flowing through a conductor (plasma, e.g. ionized gas) and that electric current has an accompanying magnetic field.
The "violent breakage" of magnetic field lines is, in fact, exploding Double Layers (a characteristic plasma phenomenon). The plasmas form isolated double layers that are under huge amounts of electrical stress, and are also unstable. When the DL breaks down, the current quickly flows (violently, if there is enough of it.. think of an overloaded capacitor rupturing) in the gap, until the natural, normal, signature behavior of twisting filaments (Birkeland currents) resumes.
This video is very pretty but utterly unspectacular in terms of demonstrating something new... unless, of course, the astronomers and cosmologists involved were to suddenly realize that the electric currents that *must* accompany all of these observed magnetic fields are actually, you know, INVOLVED in observed solar/galactic/universal phenomena.
I'm not holding my breath.
are you kidding, it's hard enough to get physicists to acknowledge electricity much less accept that it's the cause of something like this. they simply don't have an engineer's knowledge of how electricity works.
to them electricity is what jumps out at you whenever you unplug a device or shove a knife in the socket. to an engineer electricity is a highly stable system that will always follow the rules and the only real danger is the idiot trying to use it wrong. and lightning, everyone knows that if you get hit by lightning then your just having a bad day.
if more physicists took electricity more seriously we would already be in an age of wireless energy.
to mars or bust!
Kelvin is not, nor has not degrees. Rather it just is kelvin regardless of magnitude. i.e. 20,000 kelvin.
Interesting nonetheless.