Lightsabers: Scientist Explains How to Make a Real One

A scientists may have found a way to built a real lightsaber, the weapon used by the Jedi and the Sith in the famous movie franchise “Star Wars”.

In the movies, the lightsabers are four-foot long (1.2 metres) glowing blades that have great amounts of compact and powerful energy supply. They can easily melt metal and cut through flesh, but they cannot pass through each other. The bright blades of the lightsabers also come in different colours that have different meanings: Blue, Green, Purple, Red, Orange, Gold, Silver, Yellow, Bronze, White, and Black.

People might think that, given their name, lightsabers are made of some type of lasers, but that is not the case. Lasers do not have a fixed length, compared with the lightsabers that do.

A more realistic technology that could be used to build a real, working lightsaber would be plasma. It is one of the four fundamental states of matter, the other three being solid, liquid, and gas. The material can be created through ionization, a process in which the atoms of a gas are stripped of their electrons. The stripping also causes the plasma to glow.

Plasmas are usually very hot. However, in light tubes the density of the fluorescent gas is very low, which means that the total amount of heat energy is also low, even though the temperature of plasma is rather high.

There is some plasma, like plasma torches (also known as plasma cutters), that can generate a lot of heat. The simplest way to create a plasma torch involves a flowing material, like nitrogen or oxygen, and two electrodes. Plasma is electrically conductive, so in the plasma cutting process, an electrical channel of ionized gas (plasma) is used to cut through things.

The base technology of a lightsabers could be plasma, but we still need to figure out how to contain it. Magnetic fields could be the answer. Since plasma is composed of charged particles it can be manipulated using magnetic fields. There are some technologies in nuclear researches that contain plasma with the help of magnetic fields. Any other containment vessels would melt because of the high temperatures of fusion plasmas.

To help the magnetically contained plasma lightsabers not pass through one another, scientist could use ceramics. Even when this material is brought to extremely high temperatures it does not soften, melt, or distort. However, it is important to note that a solid ceramic core would not work.

Image Source: geek