Fun with Plasma ball | English
Channel: Arvind Gupta
Date: 13/01/2016

We all have seen natural lightening, yellow sodium lamps on streets and this little plasma ball 
somewhere. So, how do they work and what is the secret behind it? Let’s see! So, this is a small plasma ball, and as we power it, we see fire like trails or streams coming towards our fingers. So, what are these colorful trails? So let us first learn what is plasma? As you would know air is around us, which is a mixture of several gases and usually they are neutral in charge. But, when we keep them in the low pressure and high voltage, these gases divide into positive and negative particles/ions. This mixture of ions is known as plasma. When these charged particles collide with other particles, they gain extra energy which they later emit as light. This is the similar phenomenon we observe in simple bulbs or in sodium lamps. Now, we can understand what is happening in this plasma ball? There are three main parts in plasma balls. The first is the glass hollow shell, the second is special gas filled at low pressure and the third is high voltage electrode. As we power our plasma ball, you can see gas inside turns into plasma and they travel from high voltage electrode to low voltage through our fingers. And this shows our body is like a conductor. As we bring more fingers over this ball we see more trails because of nearby charged particles get attracted. So, in nature as well we see this flow of charge particles from high voltage to low voltage, which is the reason why we see lightning. And when these charges interact with earth’s magnetic field, we see colorful southern and northern lightening, which we call Aurora Borealis. As you have seen this can be a simple and cheap tool to teach school kids about ionization and their different properties.

This work is supported by IUCAA (www.iucaa.in) and TATA Trust (www.tata.com/aboutus/sub_index/Tata-trusts)

Credits:,Ashok Rupner, Manish Jain, Pradnya Pujari, Shivaji Mane, Jyoti Hiremath, Arvind Gupta, Vidula Mhaiskar, Anand Singh TATA Trust: Education is one of the key focus areas for Tata Trusts, aiming towards enabling access of quality education to the underprivileged population in India. To facilitate quality in teaching and learning of Science education through workshops, capacity building and resource creation, Tata Trusts have been supporting Muktangan Vigyan Shodhika (MVS), IUCAA's Children’s Science Centre, since inception. To know more about other initiatives of Tata Trusts, please visit www.tatatrusts.org