Latest Plasma Stories
The manufacturing of semiconductor wafers used in all types of electronics involves etching small features onto a wafer with lasers, a process that is ultimately limited by the wavelength of the light itself. The semiconductor industry is rapidly approaching this fundamental limit for increasing the speed of the microchip. The development of a new intense 13.5-nm (extreme ultraviolet or EUV) light source will resolve this issue by reducing the feature size by an order of magnitude or so,...
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C., Dec. 14, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Talecris Biotherapeutics Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: TLCR) announced today that a jury in the General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, Wake County, North Carolina, rendered a verdict on December 13, 2010 in the amount of $37 million in favor of Plasma Centers of America, LLC, against its subsidiary, Talecris Plasma Resources, Inc., in a breach of contract claim. Talecris had a three-year Plasma Sale/Purchase...
LAKE ZURICH, Ill., Nov. 29, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Fenwal, Inc., a global medical technology company focused on improving blood collection, separation, safety and availability, announced today that in a trial of its new Autopheresis-C® software, plasma-center professionals and donors reported faster plasma-collection times and an improved plasma-collection and donation experience. More than 90 percent of donors surveyed reported a decrease in their donation wait time. Donors who are more...
CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas, Nov. 18, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- Plasma Technologies, Inc., a Texas corporation, has entered into an agreement with Wellborn, Kyle, Pilkinton, Fry, PC, a Texas-based corporation, giving it rights to distribute the Plasma NO device in Mexico and South America. As a part of this agreement Plasma Technologies, Inc. has received $1 million in equity funding and $1 million in distribution fees from Wellborn, Kyle, Pilkinton, Fry, PC. The $2 million in funding and fees will...
More accurate simulations could lead to 'break-even' fusion in foreseeable futureA new X-ray imaging capability has taken pictures of a critical instability at the heart of Sandia's huge Z accelerator. The effort may help remove a major impediment in the worldwide, multidecade, multibillion dollar effort to harness nuclear fusion to generate electrical power from sea water."These are the first controlled measurements of the growth of magneto-Rayleigh-Taylor [MRT] instabilities" in...
Coaxial helicity injection could make fusion reactors cheaperResearchers at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory have successfully used Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI) to generate plasma current and couple it to a conventional current generation method at the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) fusion experiment. After coupling, the combined process generated 1 million amperes of current using 40 percent less energy than needed to generate this current using the conventional means...
News from the 52nd annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma PhysicsFusion plasmas in the laboratory typically reach 100 million degrees. These high temperatures are required to ignite the hydrogen plasma and maintain the fusion burn by the production of high-energy alpha particles. One challenge for a fusion reactor is how to contain the alpha particles in the vessel long enough for the particles to efficiently heat the hydrogen plasma. One way that these alpha particles can escape the...
News from the 52nd annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma PhysicsJust like an electrical switch allows the flow of electricity into electrical circuits, relativistic transparency in plasma can act like a fast optical switch allowing the flow of light through otherwise opaque plasma. Modern day lasers, such as the Trident laser in Los Alamos National Laboratory delivers a 200 terawatt power pulse (roughly 400 times the average electrical consumption of the United States) in half a...
News from the 52nd annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma PhysicsWhen physicists probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty. Much as when the Hubble Space Telescope sent back vivid images from space of ionized gas clouds (an interstellar plasma!), new 3D images of shear Alfvén waves are delighting both scientists and a new generation of science enthusiasts.Plasmas support a large variety of waves. Some of these are...
News from the 52nd annual meeting of the APS Division of Plasma PhysicsThe Sun sporadically expels trillions of tons of million-degree hydrogen gas in explosions called coronal mass ejections (CMEs). Such clouds are enormous in size (spanning millions of miles) and are made up of magnetized plasma gases, so hot that hydrogen atoms are ionized. CMEs are rapidly accelerated by magnetic forces to speeds of hundreds of kilometers per second to upwards of 2,000 kilometers per second in several...
Latest Plasma Reference Libraries
Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén (May 30, 1908 - April 2, 1995) was a Swedish plasma physicist born in Norrköping, Sweden. Alfvén received his PhD from the University of Uppsala in 1934. His thesis was titled "Investigations of the Ultra-short Electromagnetic Waves." He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved on to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics. Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the...
Heliopause -- The heliopause is the boundary where our Sun's solar wind is stopped by the interstellar medium. The solar wind blows a "bubble" in the interstellar medium (the rareified hydrogen and helium gas that permeates the galaxy). The point where the solar wind's strength is no longer great enough to push back the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause, and is often considered to be the outer "border" of the solar system. The distance to the heliopause is not precisely...
Solar Prominence -- Solar prominences are large arch-shaped structures observable in the solar corona. These often have a twist and occasionally become unstable, ejecting plasma and magnetic flux out from the sun. The physics of solar prominence instability is believed to be governed by magnetic forces and magnetic helicity issues. It is thought that instability occurs when a magnetic flux tube becomes excessively twisted. ----- Click here to learn more on this topic from eLibrary:
