Summary
This award supports a collaborative effort at West Virginia University and the University of New Hampshire to study energy conversion in weakly collisional plasmas. One of the most challenging problems in the study of plasmas - gases hot enough that electrons come apart from the atoms - is understanding how energy is converted between electromagnetic fields and the thermal energy of the plasma, which is the energy associated with random motion of the electrically charged particles. This is an important problem across many types of plasmas, including plasmas in space and the very hot plasmas
