It is now time
to refine the model a bit. But first some motivation! Remember the whole “building
a sun on earth” business? What people are trying to do is bring a plasma to a
high enough temperature, in order to make Hydrogen combine to give Helium, a
process known as fusion, which produces enormous amounts of energy, and
actually powers the sun!
But how do you
confine plasma? Since we can’t use electric fields, we have to use high
magnetic fields! The particles (electrons and ions) are forced to spiral around
the magnetic field lines and are therefore confined!
Such a device is
known as TOKAMAK, and looks something like this
WOW, this is
complicated!
Let’s start
again, taking away all technical details we are left with something like this
That’s better! The
coils produce a toroidal magnetic field, so electrons and ions move around this
doughnut-shaped vessel.
We now see that
magnetized plasma is important, let’s see a couple of waves that can occur
inside it (again in a simplified case)