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"I was able to show that even if the grape

Nov. 17, 2017 by Carolyn Mueller

"I was able to show that even if the grape had been cut, it would still be a plasma with a large amount of ionized gas," Slepkov says. "If I was to cut a piece of paper with a bit of skin along the edges and make it fire with the electrons, then it would still produce sparks. When I started to try to explain to my students the plasma behavior, I got some ideas. One of them was to try to determine how much of the plasma was actually fired and how much of it was created by the experiments."

"I don't think this is the first time I've seen people trying to explain plasma in other ways," he says. "Some of the techniques I've described can be used in a lab if you really understand what you're doing."

In a second approach, Khattak and his colleagues found that the plasma in the original experiment produced a plasma with a large amount of ionized gas. The plasma started shooting, but as it turned around, it was still a plasma with a large amount of ionized gas.

"I didn't expect to get the plasma sparks in my experiments at the beginning; maybe it took quite a while, but it was still an exciting plasma," he says.

He did a simulation of the experiment and found that it was not really the plasma that was the cause. It was the plasma with the large amount of ionized gas in the first experiment, but instead the plasma had been completely turned around so that the ionized gas was coming from outside the bottle. Khattak and his colleagues then used a computer simulation to figure out what this meant.

"The plasma had probably been just vaporized in the laboratory before the experiment," he says.