Dennis Whyte

And it's because the particles have electric charge, this means that they can push against each other without actually being in close proximity to each other.

That's not an infinitely true statement, which if you go together, it's a little bit more technical.

But basically, this means that you can start having action or exchange of information at a distance.

And that's, in fact, the definition of a plasma, that it says, these have a technical name, it's called a Coulomb collision, it just means that it's dictated by this force which is being pushed between the charged particles, is that the definition of a plasma is a medium in which the collective behavior is dominated by these collisions at a distance.

So you can imagine then this starts to give you some strange behaviors, which I could quickly talk about.

One of the most counterintuitive ones is as plasmas get more hot, as they get higher in temperature, then the collisions happen less frequently.

Like what?

That doesn't make any sense.

When particles go faster, you think they would collide more often.

But because the particles are interacting through their electric field, when they're going faster, they actually spend less time in the influential field of each other.

And so they talk to each other less in an energy and momentum exchange point of view.

Just one of the counterintuitive aspects of plasmids.

Usually deuterium and tritium, which are the heavy forms of hydrogen.

Oh, first it becomes plasma.

So it's a gas and then it turns into a plasma at about 10,000 degrees.

So you asked about the definitions of the requirements for fusion.

So the most famous one, or in some sense the most intuitive one, is the temperature.

And the reason for that is that you can make many, many kinds of plasmas that have zero fusion going on in them.

And the reason for this is that the average, you can make a plasma at around 10,000.

In fact, if you come, by the way, you're welcome to come to our laboratory at the PSFC.