Articles by Robert Erck

The article "Plasmas Show Promise As Next Step For Accelerators" (Tom Abate, The Scientist, Nov. 23, 1992, page 15) contained the sentence "He knew that a laser fired into a cloud of hydrogen-- chosen for its simple atomic structure--would superheat the gas, stripping the electrons from their nuclei and thus creating a plasma." The word superheat has a specific thermodynamic meaning. It means to raise the temperature of a substance above a transition temperature without the equilibrium phase f