Worked Examples

Plasma physics is a subject where the formulas are short and the numbers are enormous, and where physical intuition mostly comes from having once put real values into the expressions. Each example below is worked end to end, with the arithmetic shown and the result interpreted.

• Plasma parameters of five real plasmas — the same four formulas applied from a candle flame to an ICF pellet, and what the answers disqualify
• The ionosphere as a mirror — why shortwave circles the globe at night and GPS does not bounce
• Loss cone of the Van Allen belts — the aurora, computed
• A Z-pinch that would work, if it were stable — Bennett relation, then the instability that kills it

Related interactive tools: the Debye shielding lab does the first example's arithmetic for any plasma you like, and the drift orbit lab lets you find the third example's loss cone by experiment.