About Plasma TVs

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History and how it works

The first plasma TV was sold to the public by Pioneer in 1997.

"For most of its time, it was a solution looking for a problem," - Larry Weber, inventor of the plasma technology inside all plasma televisions at the University of Illinois in 1964.

The basic idea of a plasma screen is to illuminate tiny fluorescent colored lights to form a pixel. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights -- a red light, a green light and a blue light. The pixels are added together to form the image on the full screen. The plasma display varies the intensities of the different lights to produce a full range of colors.

The central element in a fluorescent light is a plasma, a gas made up of free-flowing ions (electrically charged atoms) and electrons (negatively charged particles). Under normal conditions, a gas is mainly made up of uncharged particles. That is, the individual gas atoms include equal numbers of protons (positively charged particles in the atom's nucleus) and electrons. The negatively charged electrons perfectly balance the positively charged protons, so the atom has a net charge of zero.

If you introduce many free electrons into the gas by establishing an electrical voltage across it, the situation changes very quickly. The free electrons collide with the atoms, knocking loose other electrons. With a missing electron, an atom loses its balance. It has a net positive charge, making it an ion.

In a plasma with an electrical current running through it, negatively charged particles are rushing toward the positively charged area of the plasma, and positively charged particles are rushing toward the negatively charged area. Particles are constantly bumping into each other. These collisions excite the gas atoms in the plasma, causing them to release photons of energy, thus lighting up.

So, what's plasma?

Plasma is often called the "Fourth State of Matter", the other three being solid, liquid and gas. A plasma is a distinct state of matter containing a significant number of electrically charged particles, a number sufficient to affect its electrical properties and behavior. In addition to being important in many aspects of our daily lives, plasmas are estimated to constitute more than 99 percent of the visible universe.

In an ordinary gas each atom contains an equal number of positive and negative charges; the positive charges in the nucleus are surrounded by an equal number of negatively charged electrons, and each atom is electrically "neutral". A gas becomes a plasma when the addition of heat or other energy causes a significant number of atoms to release some or all of their electrons. The remaining parts of those atoms are left with a positive charge, and the detached negative electrons are free to move about. Those atoms and the resulting electrically charged gas are said to be "ionized". When enough atoms are ionized to significantly affect the electrical characteristics of the gas, it is a plasma.

In many cases interactions between the charged particles and the neutral particles are important in determining the behavior and usefulness of the plasma. The type of atoms in a plasma, the ratio of ionized to neutral particles and the particle energies all result in a broad spectrum of plasma types, characteristics and behaviors. These unique behaviors cause plasmas to be useful in a large and growing number of important applications in our lives.

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