List of plasma physicists
Encyclopedia
  • Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov
    Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov
    Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov is a Soviet and Russian theoretical physicist whose main contributions are in the field of condensed matter physics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003.- Biography :...

  • Hannes Alfvén
    Hannes Alfvén
    Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén was a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics . He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves...

     - Received the only Nobel Prize specifically for contributions to plasma physics.
  • Willard Harrison Bennett
    Willard Harrison Bennett
    Willard Harrison Bennett was a scientist and inventor, born in Findlay, Ohio. Bennett conducted research into plasma physics, astrophysics, geophysics, surface physics, and physical chemistry...

     - The Z-pinch
    Z-pinch
    In fusion power research, the Z-pinch, also known as zeta pinch or Bennett pinch , is a type of plasma confinement system that uses an electrical current in the plasma to generate a magnetic field that compresses it...

     is a form of "Bennett pinch". Also invented radio frequency mass spectrometry
    Mass spectrometry
    Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique that measures the mass-to-charge ratio of charged particles.It is used for determining masses of particles, for determining the elemental composition of a sample or molecule, and for elucidating the chemical structures of molecules, such as peptides and...

    .
  • Kristian Birkeland
    Kristian Birkeland
    Kristian Olaf Birkeland was a Norwegian scientist. He is best remembered as the person who first elucidated the nature of the Aurora borealis. In order to fund his research on the aurorae, he invented the electromagnetic cannon and the Birkeland-Eyde process of fixing nitrogen from the air...

     - First suggested that polar electric currents (or auroral electrojet
    Electrojet
    An electrojet is an electric current which travels around the E region of the Earth's ionosphere. There are two electrojets: above the magnetic equator , and near the Northern and Southern Polar Circles . Electrojets are Hall currents carried primarily by electrons at altitudes from 100 to...

    s) are connected to a system of filaments (now called "Birkeland current
    Birkeland current
    A Birkeland current is a set of currents which flow along geomagnetic field line connecting the Earth’s magnetosphere to the Earth's high latitude ionosphere. They are a specific class of magnetic field-aligned currents. Lately, the term Birkeland currents has been expanded by some authors to...

    s") that flow along geomagnetic field lines into and away from the polar region.
  • David Bohm
    David Bohm
    David Joseph Bohm FRS was an American-born British quantum physicist who contributed to theoretical physics, philosophy, neuropsychology, and the Manhattan Project.-Youth and college:...

     - derived the Bohm sheath criterion, which states that a plasma
    Plasma (physics)
    In physics and chemistry, plasma is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles are ionized. Heating a gas may ionize its molecules or atoms , thus turning it into a plasma, which contains charged particles: positive ions and negative electrons or ions...

     must flow with at least the speed of sound toward a solid surface
  • Fran Bosnjakovic
    Fran Bošnjakovic
    Fran Bošnjaković was a noted Croatian engineer.Bošnjaković was born in Zagreb, where he was initially educated. He continued his education at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden, Germany...

  • Oscar Buneman
    Oscar Buneman
    Oscar Buneman made advances in science, engineering, and mathematics. Buneman was a pioneer of computational plasma physics and plasma simulation....

     - Pioneer of computational plasma physics and plasma
    Plasma (physics)
    In physics and chemistry, plasma is a state of matter similar to gas in which a certain portion of the particles are ionized. Heating a gas may ionize its molecules or atoms , thus turning it into a plasma, which contains charged particles: positive ions and negative electrons or ions...

     simulation
    Simulation
    Simulation is the imitation of some real thing available, state of affairs, or process. The act of simulating something generally entails representing certain key characteristics or behaviours of a selected physical or abstract system....

    .
  • C. A. Cattell - Pioneering observations of electrostatic solitary waves and the discovery of large amplitude whistler (radio)
    Whistler (radio)
    A whistler is a very low frequency electromagnetic wave which can be generated, for example, by lightning. Frequencies of terrestrial whistlers are 1 to 30 kHz, with maximum usually at 3 to 5 kHz. Although they are electromagnetic waves, they occur at audio frequencies, and can be...

     waves in the terrestrial radiation belts. She is also part of the Physics Force team at the University of Minnesota
    University of Minnesota
    The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is a public research university located in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, United States. It is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system and has the fourth-largest main campus student body in the United States, with 52,557...

    .
  • F. F. Chen
  • Liu Chen
    Liu Chen (physicist)
    Liu Chen , is an American plasma physicist. Chen is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine .-Biography:Chen graduated from the National Taiwan University in 1966. In 1972 Chen obtained PhD from the University of California, Berkeley...

  • William Crookes
    William Crookes
    Sir William Crookes, OM, FRS was a British chemist and physicist who attended the Royal College of Chemistry, London, and worked on spectroscopy...

  • Ronald C. Davidson
    Ronald C. Davidson
    Ronald C. Davidson is a Canadian physicist, professor and scientific administrator who works in the United States. He served as the first director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center from 1978 to 1988, and as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1991 to 1996...

    , first director MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center
    MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center
    The Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a research laboratory for the study of plasma physics and nuclear fusion...

  • Peter Debye
    Peter Debye
    Peter Joseph William Debye FRS was a Dutch physicist and physical chemist, and Nobel laureate in Chemistry.-Early life:...

     - Nobel Prize winning physicist and chemist, after whom Debye shielding and Debye length
    Debye length
    In plasma physics, the Debye length , named after the Dutch physicist and physical chemist Peter Debye, is the scale over which mobile charge carriers screen out electric fields in plasmas and other conductors. In other words, the Debye length is the distance over which significant charge...

     are named
  • Philo Farnsworth
    Philo Farnsworth
    Philo Taylor Farnsworth was an American inventor and television pioneer. Although he made many contributions that were crucial to the early development of all-electronic television, he is perhaps best known for inventing the first fully functional all-electronic image pickup device , the "image...

     - credited with the invention of the cathode ray tube
    Cathode ray tube
    The cathode ray tube is a vacuum tube containing an electron gun and a fluorescent screen used to view images. It has a means to accelerate and deflect the electron beam onto the fluorescent screen to create the images. The image may represent electrical waveforms , pictures , radar targets and...

    , television
    Television
    Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

     and Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor
  • Harold Furth
    Harold Furth
    Harold P. Furth was an Austrian-American physicist.Furth emigrated to the United States in 1941. He graduated from Harvard University with a Bachelor's degree in 1951 and received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1960...

  • Vitaly Ginzburg
    Vitaly Ginzburg
    Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg ForMemRS was a Soviet theoretical physicist, astrophysicist, Nobel laureate, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and one of the fathers of Soviet hydrogen bomb...

  • Russell Alan Hulse
    Russell Alan Hulse
    Russell Alan Hulse is an American physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., "for the discovery of a new type of pulsar, a discovery that has opened up new possibilities for the study of gravitation"...

  • Predhiman Kaw
    Predhiman Kaw
    Predhiman Krishan Kaw is an Indian plasma physicist, who is currently the director of the Institute for Plasma Research. He was born on January 15, 1948 at Srinagar, India. He did his matriculation from Punjab University and completed his M.Sc...

  • P. J. Kellogg - Predicted the existence of the terrestrial
    Terrestrial
    Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth.Terrestrial may also refer to:* Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on or near the ground, as opposed to in trees etc.** A fishing fly that simulates the...

     bow shock
    Bow shock
    A bow shock is the area between a magnetosphere and an ambient medium. For stars, this is typically the boundary between their stellar wind and the interstellar medium....

     in 1962. Some of the first theoretical work on solitary waves and the two steam instability in 1964 and 1965. He also did some of the first work on time-of-flight mechanisms relating to electron beams and Langmuir waves in the terrestrial foreshock
    Foreshock
    A foreshock is an earthquake that occurs before a larger seismic event and is related to it in both time and space. The designation of an earthquake as foreshock, mainshock or aftershock is only possible after the event....

    . More recent work has focused on the interaction of large amplitude whistler (radio)
    Whistler (radio)
    A whistler is a very low frequency electromagnetic wave which can be generated, for example, by lightning. Frequencies of terrestrial whistlers are 1 to 30 kHz, with maximum usually at 3 to 5 kHz. Although they are electromagnetic waves, they occur at audio frequencies, and can be...

     waves and electrons in the radiation belts.
  • Shaukat Hameed Khan
    Shaukat Hameed Khan
    Shaukat Hameed Khan , , is a Pakistani nuclear physicist and a senior professor of nuclear physics at the Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology. He previously had served as the rector of Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology...

  • Lev Davidovich Landau
  • Irving Langmuir
    Irving Langmuir
    Irving Langmuir was an American chemist and physicist. His most noted publication was the famous 1919 article "The Arrangement of Electrons in Atoms and Molecules" in which, building on Gilbert N. Lewis's cubical atom theory and Walther Kossel's chemical bonding theory, he outlined his...

     - Developed electron temperature concepts and an electrostatic probe, the Langmuir probe
    Langmuir probe
    A Langmuir probe is a device named after Nobel Prize winning physicist Irving Langmuir, used to determine the electron temperature, electron density, and electric potential of a plasma. It works by inserting one or more electrodes into a plasma, with a constant or time-varying electric potential...

    . Coined the term "plasma" to hint at the life-like behavior of this state of matter.
  • Eric Lerner
    Eric Lerner
    Eric J. Lerner is an American popular science writer, independent plasma researcher, and serves as the president of Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc...

     - Pioneer of focus fusion and advocate of plasma cosmology
    Plasma cosmology
    Plasma cosmology is a non-standard cosmology generally attributed to a 1970 Nobel laureate named Hannes Alfvén. Ionized gases, or plasmas, play the central part in plasma cosmology's explanation for the development of the universe, thus dominated largely by electrodynamic forces rather than...

  • R. L. Lysak - Pioneering work on Alfven waves and generation of displacement currents in the auroral acceleration region.
  • Allan Merchant - Spectral Properties of the Baslescu-Lenard Equation]]]
  • Ernst Messerschmid
  • Forrest S. Mozer
    Forrest S. Mozer
    Forrest S. Mozer is an American experimental physicist, inventor, and entrepreneur known best for his pioneering work on electric field measurements in space plasma and for development of solid state electronic speech synthesizers and speech recognizers....

      - electric field measurements in space plasma
  • Ghulam Murtaza
    Ghulam Murtaza
    Ghulam Murtaza Urdu: غلام مرتضى, , , is a Pakistani plasma physicist and mathematician. He is the Professor of Theoretical and Plasma physics, and the director of the Physics research institute, known as the Abdus Salam Chair in Physics, at the Government College University...

  • Friedrich Paschen
    Friedrich Paschen
    Louis Karl Heinrich Friedrich Paschen , was a German physicist, known for his work on electrical discharges. He is also known for the Paschen series, a series of hydrogen spectral lines in the infrared region that he first observed in 1908...

     - known for his law
    Paschen's law
    Paschen's Law, named after Friedrich Paschen, was first stated in 1889. He studied the breakdown voltage of gas between parallel plates as a function of pressure and gap distance. The voltage necessary to arc across the gap decreased up to a point as the pressure was reduced. It then increased,...

     on breakdown voltage
  • Anthony Peratt - electrical engineer and advocate of plasma cosmology
    Plasma cosmology
    Plasma cosmology is a non-standard cosmology generally attributed to a 1970 Nobel laureate named Hannes Alfvén. Ionized gases, or plasmas, play the central part in plasma cosmology's explanation for the development of the universe, thus dominated largely by electrodynamic forces rather than...

  • Marshall Rosenbluth
    Marshall Rosenbluth
    Marshall Nicholas Rosenbluth was an American plasma physicist and member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1997 he was awarded the National Medal of Science for discoveries in controlled thermonuclear fusion, contributions to plasma physics and work in computational statistical mechanics. ...

  • Dr. J. Reece Roth - Inventor of atmospheric plasma technologies.
  • Megh Nad Saha - Saha equation
  • Andrey Dmitriyevich Sakharov - Proposed the development of the tokamak
    Tokamak
    A tokamak is a device using a magnetic field to confine a plasma in the shape of a torus . Achieving a stable plasma equilibrium requires magnetic field lines that move around the torus in a helical shape...

     device for use in controlled thermonuclear fusion.
  • Rudolf Seeliger
    Rudolf Seeliger
    Rudolf Seeliger was a German physicist who specialized in electric discharges in gases and plasma physics....

  • Lyman Spitzer
    Lyman Spitzer
    Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. was an American theoretical physicist and astronomer best known for his research in star formation, plasma physics, and in 1946, for conceiving the idea of telescopes operating in outer space...

  • Johannes Stark
    Johannes Stark
    Johannes Stark was a German physicist, and Physics Nobel Prize laureate who was closely involved with the Deutsche Physik movement under the Nazi regime.-Early years:...

  • Igor Tamm
    Igor Tamm
    Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist and Nobel laureate who received most prestigious Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for the discovery of Cherenkov radiation, made in 1934.-Biography:Tamm was born in Vladivostok, Russian Empire , in a...

  • Nikola Tesla
    Nikola Tesla
    Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer...

     - inventor, physicist
    Physicist
    A physicist is a scientist who studies or practices physics. Physicists study a wide range of physical phenomena in many branches of physics spanning all length scales: from sub-atomic particles of which all ordinary matter is made to the behavior of the material Universe as a whole...

    , mechanical and electrical engineer
  • Lewi Tonks
    Lewi Tonks
    Lewi Tonks was an American quantum physicist noted for his discovery of the Tonks-Girardeau gas.Tonks was employed by the General Electric for most of his working life, researching microwaves and ferromagnetism...

  • Anatoly Vlasov
    Anatoly Vlasov
    Anatoly Alexandrovich Vlasov was a Russian theoretical physicist prominent in the fields of statistical mechanics, kinetics, and especially in plasma physics.-Biography:...

     - first suggested the Vlasov equation
    Vlasov equation
    The Vlasov equation is a differential equation describing time evolution of the distribution function of plasma consisting of charged particles with long-range interaction...

     for a correct description of plasma with long-range interaction between particles
  • J. R. Wygant - electric field measurements in space plasmas

Relevant Spacecraft

  • Advanced Composition Explorer
    Advanced Composition Explorer
    Advanced Composition Explorer is a NASA space exploration mission being conducted as part of the Explorer program to study matter in situ, comprising energetic particles from the solar wind, the interplanetary medium, and other sources. Real-time data from ACE is used by the Space Weather...

     (ACE), launched 1997, still operational.
  • Helios (spacecraft)
  • MESSENGER
    MESSENGER
    The MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging space probe is a robotic NASA spacecraft in orbit around the planet Mercury. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004 to study the chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field of Mercury...

     (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging), launched 2004, still operational.
  • Radiation Belt Storm Probes
    Radiation Belt Storm Probes
    The Radiation Belt Storm Probes is a NASA mission under the Living With a Star program. The goal of the LWS program is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to effectively address those aspects of the connected Sun-Earth system that directly affect life and society...

  • Solar Dynamics Observatory
    Solar Dynamics Observatory
    The Solar Dynamics Observatory is a NASA mission which will observe the Sun for over five years. Launched on February 11, 2010, the observatory is part of the Living With a Star program...

     (SDO), launched 2010, still operational.
  • Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
    Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
    The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is a spacecraft built by a European industrial consortium led by Matra Marconi Space that was launched on a Lockheed Martin Atlas IIAS launch vehicle on December 2, 1995 to study the Sun, and has discovered over 2100 comets. It began normal operations in May...

     (SOHO), launched 1995, still operational.
  • Solar Maximum Mission
    Solar Maximum Mission
    The Solar Maximum Mission satellite was designed to investigate solar phenomenon, particularly solar flares. It was launched on February 14, 1980....

     (SMM), launched 1980, decommissioned 1989.
  • Solar Orbiter
    Solar Orbiter
    Solar Orbiter is a planned Sun-observing satellite, under development by the European Space Agency . The main mission scenario is a launch by an Atlas V from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in January 2017...

     (SOLO), set to launch in 2015.
  • Solar Probe Plus, set to launch in 2015.
  • STEREO
    STEREO
    STEREO is a solar observation mission. Two nearly identical spacecraft were launched into orbits that cause them to respectively pull farther ahead of and fall gradually behind the Earth...

     (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), launched 2006, still operational.
  • Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE), launched 1998, decommissioned 2010.
  • Ulysses (spacecraft), launched 1990, decommissioned 2009.
  • WIND (spacecraft), launched 1994, still operational.
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