Laboratory plasma

Laboratory plasma is an ionized gas produced and studied under controlled conditions. Experiments use it to investigate plasma behavior or test applications.

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Plasma parameters: Quantities such as density, temperature, and collision frequency that characterize a plasma. These measurements specify the state and operating regime of a laboratory plasma.
Plasma: A state of matter containing enough free charged particles to exhibit collective electromagnetic behavior. Laboratory plasmas are controlled instances of this broader state of matter.
Tokamak: A toroidal magnetic-confinement device designed to contain hot plasma. Tokamaks are major laboratory platforms for studying fusion plasmas.
Glow discharge: A self-sustained electrical discharge through a gas that emits light at low pressure. It is a classic laboratory plasma whose luminous regions expose discharge structure.
Plasma turbulence: Disordered, nonlinear plasma motion spanning interacting spatial and temporal scales. Laboratory measurements test theories of turbulent transport and energy transfer.
Debye shielding: The screening of electric fields by rearrangements of charged particles in a plasma. It explains why laboratory plasmas behave collectively beyond the Debye length.
Ionization: The process by which atoms or molecules gain or lose electrons and become charged. Creating a laboratory plasma requires ionizing some fraction of its gas.
Inductively coupled plasma: A plasma sustained by electromagnetic induction from a radio-frequency coil. This source produces stable plasmas used in processing and elemental analysis.
Arc discharge: A sustained electrical discharge with high current and a hot, conductive plasma channel. Arc experiments probe strongly heated plasmas and their interactions with electrodes.
Anomalous transport: Particle or heat transport in a plasma that exceeds predictions from classical collisions. Experiments investigate how turbulence and collective effects produce this excess transport.