Physicists Create Great Balls of Fire

dylanduck writes "Talk about having fun at work. These guys have created luminous clouds of ball lightning up to 20 centimetres across and lasting up to half a second, longer and more realistic than before. There's a cool video too. They say it may even help understand how to contain the plasmas needed for nuclear fusion."

Comments

Video?

[ironwill96]

The video is more of a 19 second slideshow of 6 pictures. I was hoping to see an actual high-speed video of the event not a "video" of pictures.

Re:Video?

[Tx]

Pointlessly late reply, but for the benefit of anyone stumbling on this thread in the future:

Modern ultra high speed cameras of at least one type (the type with which I'm very familiar) consist of several effectively separate digital still cameras looking down the same optical axis via a beamsplitter. Special image intensifiers are used on each still camera module to provide "shuttering" and coincidently to amplify the light enough to get a decent picture at the ridiculously short exposure times used. In order to achieve frame rates of up to 1 billion frames per second (yes, billion), and exposures down to a few hundred picoseconds, a pulse is applied to each of the image intensifiers in rapid sequence. Although the exposure times may be less than a nanosecond, the captured image glows on the phosophor screen for many milliseconds, plenty of time to capture it on the CCDs.

Film-based cameras involving a rapidly spun reel as mentioned in the parent aren't capable of speeds of more than a few thousand fps. However film-based cameras involving a rapidly rotating mirror and a stationary loop of film can achieve frame rates in the millions.

These Physicists are Pretty Slow

[Morosoph]

People have been producing ball lightning in microwave ovens for years!

Re:That's great

[AchilleTalon]

Maybe you should have read more carefully the article. The whole thing is about plasma, which is ionized gas at high temperature. And if you know a little bit about what is going on at ITER you should now understand any advance in plasma behavior knowledge maybe useful to the nuclear fusion experiments and hopefully future commercial reactors.

This has nothing to do with the nuclear reaction itself, but rather than with the mean the nuclear reaction is triggered into a torus-shaped plasma. One of the great challenges is to produce a self-sustained plasma. Since, this Zeus-like experiment seems to prove there is a way to produce a self-sustained plasma for much more long times than it is possible right now in all other fusion experimental reactors, this single thing may lead to significant advances in the nuclear fusion industry if well understood and applicable to plasmas produced inside Tokamak-like devices.

Hope this helped you to better understand the link between these apparently unrelated two things.

Damn

[steve_bryan]

Damn, damn, damn, damn. As soon as I clicked post I realized I had committed the hilarious mistake of making a classic spelling error while correcting the spelling of someone else. Of course the correct spelling is misspell which looks ridiculous but is correct. I only spell check for words that feel unfamiliar since I get so many false positives otherwise. I suppose that might be the case for the original poster. Anyhow I apologize and go fix some coffee to see if that improves my acuity.

p.s. But I'm right that there is some sort of conspiracy to misspell the word ridiculous