Plasma Implosion Experiments News Today

The London university now trails only MIT in the global rankings. Its students are prized for their employability but competition to study there is fierce

A spinning disk of plasma created in a lab has allowed scientists to bring the accretion disks around black holes down to Earth.

Plasma accretion disk around black holes recreated in the lab

Scientists smashed plasma jets together to create artificial accretion disks that could help reveal how black holes grow.

MIT PhD student Rishabh Datta is gathering measurements of a laboratory-created bow shock, seeking to verify theoretical models. His quest to understand plasma has led him to experiments on pulsed power facilities around the world, including MAGPIE at Imperial College London, and Z at Sandia National Laboratory.

MIT Assistant Professor Jack Hare studies plasma, a high-energy gas in which atomic nuclei and electrons roam around separately. Creating plasma in small quantities allows him to study how plasma behaves in the wider universe. His lab’s main instrument is a house-sized device called PUFFIN (the PUlser For Fundamental [Plasma Physics] INvestigations).