Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Short answer: no.

They have similarities such as you mentioned but only at relatively low energies.

There are several sorts of plasmas. An ionized gas is a sort of plasma, also called thin plasma.

Thin plasmas, while physically different from a metal, share a surprisingly large number of properties with it:

They both have two separate charge carriers, cations and electrons. On both, the cations have a negligible contribution to current and the electrons form a gas. They have similar dispersion relations (leading to similar "local" Ohm's law in both). It's because cations don't contribute much that they seem similar, in spite of one being a gas and the other a solid.

You may enjoy this physics stack overflow thread for an expanded answer:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/717274/how-is-a-...



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: