Bottling the world's coldest plasma
E-Mail IMAGE: Rice University graduate student Grant Gorman at work in Rice's Ultracold Atoms and Plasmas Lab. view more Credit: Photo by Jeff Fitlow/Rice University HOUSTON - (March 1, 2021) - Rice University physicists have discovered a way to trap the world's coldest plasma in a magnetic bottle, a technological achievement that could advance research into clean energy, space weather and astrophysics. "To understand how the solar wind interacts with the Earth, or to generate clean energy from nuclear fusion, one has to understand how plasma -- a soup of electrons and ions -- beh...