What is a Plasma ?

Although a plasma can exist under many conditions we shall mainly be concerned here with very hot gases composed of ionized atoms and electrons.

The optical radiation from stars is emitted by the hot plasmas of stellar atmospheres whose temperature are almost always larger than a few thousand degrees Kelvin but usually less than a million degrees.

There are two basic aspects to plasma behavior, the dynamical aspect and the atomic aspect.

THE DYNAMICAL ASPECT
The collective behavior of the plasma under the influence of internal and external forces. This is usually the most talked about aspect of plasma. Historically the term plasma was coined by Langmuir, adopted it from the field of biology because of the inherent emergent behavior such as self-organization into vortices compartmentalization and other instabilities that mimic living organisms. Lerner (1992) discusses a cosmological theory based on the dominance of plasma interactions over gravitational interactions, and the central role of electromagnetic vortices and double layers with a good side discussion on complexity theory and the advantages of the empirical approach to science. Peratt (1992) goes into the rigorous physics of many of the issues raised by Lerner and Alfven.

THE ATOMIC ASPECT
The plasma is composed of dust, molecules, atoms, ions and electrons, an in-homogeneous mixture or 'protoplasm' if you like. The quantum mechanical behavior of the distribution among the various quantum states of these particles is called statistical thermodynamics, it is mostly these properties on which the Plasma Laser Star theory is based. I do not know of any general references in this area; most are highly specialized Journal articles. There are two books on X-Ray lasers and Short wavelength lasers; Oda (1987) is a conference proceeding , the other is like an engineering textbook.

REFERENCES

  1. Lerner,E.J.: 1992, 'The Big Bang Never Happened', ISBN0-679-74049-X Vintage Books.
  2. Peratt,A.L. : 1992,'Physics of the Plasma Universe', ISBN0-387-97575-6 Springer Verlag.
  3. Oda,T. et al.: 1987, Short Wavelength Laser and Their Applications, Springer Verlag.
  4. Plasma related WWW sites.
Home Page.