Electronically charged plasma — what it is

Hey, Matt: What exactly is plasma? I don't mean the stuff that comes from our bodies, but the fourth state of matter. Cosmic stuff. The stuff that ex-X-man Havock shot out of his chest and generally blew the hell out of things? What is this plasma stuff, anyway? — Bill Hunt, commpt2RE@cars.ptloma.edu

Geez, get hustling, Bill. We can’t keep waiting for you to catch up. The rest of us are already on to the fifth state of matter, and you’re still wallowing around in state three. So if you’re ready, we’ll gather up the X-guys and jet off to answer this question and maybe destroy an evil force or two. Since there’s no room for Jubilee in the Blackbird, as usual, we’ll just leave her home to make tea and Pop Tarts for the Professor.

Matter — stuff, things, all the junk that jostles around in the universe — comes in the form of solids, liquids, or gasses. Plasmas are sometimes called the fourth state of matter but are really modified gasses. In my new kids’ book, Dick and Jane at the Plasma Center, we define the stuff as electrically charged (ionized) gaseous matter. No, not a battery-powered fart. The energy applied to the gas has to be sufficient to strip the electrons from the atoms, transforming the gas into matter that contains about equal numbers of positive ions and electrons, along with photons and other subatomic particles, which cruise around without any larger structure — a whole pack of dogs that busted their leashes and leaped the fence. When the charge is removed, the stripped atoms grab back their electrons and all is quiet in gasland again. Plasmas are usually created electrically, but intense heat, radiation, or chemical processes will work too.

Nature creates plasma regions in lightning bolts, inside that big gas bag we call the sun, the aurora borealis, and the ionosphere. Actually, most matter out there in the universe is in a plasma state. But consider the ship fitter who stops off for a beer on his way home. He’s been using plasmas all day in his arc welder and cutter; mercury vapor street lamps employ plasmas, and so do the fluorescent lights over the pool table and the neon Miller beer sign. And even as we speak, lots of drones in lots of plasma physics labs are trying to whip those particles into a frenzy so they’ll smash into each other and create fusion energy for the production of electricity.

If state four is a hot pack of wild dogs, the newly discovered state five (Bose-Einstein Condensate) is like a frozen rugby scrum — atoms that, under hypercold conditions, link together in a single coherent state. Science is thrilled at the discovery, although nobody knows quite what to do with it yet.