Jack won the Energy Zone in March 2012. Here’s what he’s been up to with his prize money…
I work at the York Plasma Institute, a new research centre at the University of York set up to study all different kinds of plasma. Plasma is the 4th state of matter – if you keep heating a gas up, eventually the electrons ‘boil off’ their atoms and you get an electrically charged gas, called a plasma.
The York Plasma Institute Outreach team next to the ‘Sundome’.
Examples in nature include the Northern lights (the Aurora), lightening and the Sun (all stars are huge balls of plasma – in fact 99% of the universe is thought to be plasma).
Man-made plasmas are used in things like lighting, making computer chips, cleaning medical instruments and in experiments to try and provide clean Fusion Energy as a power supply for the world.
Fusion is the way the sun makes its energy and if we can recreate this on Earth, we will have sustainable energy for the future. At the York Plasma Institute, we run experiments and computer models for these different kinds of plasma to try and make our man-made plasmas better at what they do, or to help try and understand plasma out in space.
To help communicate our work, we’ve set up the York Plasma Institute Outreach Team. We are running a series of events at the University of York where school students come and take part in different multimedia and real-life plasma activities.
This is a ‘Tesla coil’. It turns the air into plasma when electricity jumps from the coil tip onto the pliers. It’s similar to lightening.
We’re also hoping to take our activities to other events, like science festivals, around the country. We are developing some small, but really exciting, plasma devices that we can transport to different places so that people can see a plasma up-close.
We’re hoping to get more devices to go along side our ‘toroidal pinch’ and our ‘Tesla coil’ (see pictures).
We’re thinking about making a plasma speaker, like in this video!
We also have the ‘Sundome’, a giant inflatable dome where we project a film about how the Sun works. The film then shows how scientists are trying to build fusion energy reactors on Earth that work just like the Sun.
This is a ‘toroidal pinch’, basically a donut shaped plasma-trapping device. You can seen the plasma glowing pink inside.
One of the other activities we’re able to run using the facilities at the University of York is a 360 degree film that puts you inside the JET tokamak – the biggest magnetic fusion energy experiment in the world.
It’s a rare experience to be inside JET as it normally operates at 100 million degrees! The photos show the Outreach Team and some of the activities in action.
I’m spending my prize money on making our plasma activities better and helping the Outreach Team travel to different places so that more people can learn about plasma.
I hope you think this is a good use of the money.
