Published in ScienceNOW, 10 Nov 2011
Who at school didn’t like to play with a Van de Graaff generator? Wind it up, put a finger close to the metal shell and—zap!—a spark jolts across the gap. Now imagine the length of that electrical discharge isn’t a few millimeters, but 60 meters. That’s the accomplishment of a team of electrical engineers, which has developed a new way to create electrical discharges, or “arcs.” […]
The rest of this article is available here.