Fourth State Of Matter Gets Beautiful

Can plasma be beautiful?   Surely, anything can, but physicists are luckier than most because when they probe the mysteries of plasma, the fourth state of matter, they often discover phenomena of striking beauty. Plasmas support a large variety of waves, some familiar to all such as light and sound waves, but a great many exist nowhere else and one of the fundamental waves in magnetized plasma is the shear Alfvén wave, named after Nobel Prize winning scientist Hannes Alfvén, who predicted their existence. read more

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