Magnetic sail significant in the long term. In typical magnetic sail designs, the magnetic field is generated by a loop of superconducting wire. Because loops of current-carrying conductors tend to be forced outwards towards a circular shape by their own magnetic field, the sail could be deployed simply by unspooling the conductor and applying a current through it. The solar wind is a continuous stream of plasma that flows outwards from the Sun: near the Earth's orbit, it contains several million protons and electrons per cubic meter and flows at . The magnetic sail introduces a magnetic field into this plasma flow
Relativistic plasma light. (About 10% of protons would have formula_3 at a temperature of 481 MeV - 5.6 TK.) Still higher energies are necessary to achieve a quark–gluon plasma. The primary changes in a plasma's behavior as it approaches the relativistic regime is slight modifications to the equations which describe a non-relativistic plasma and to collision and interaction cross sections. The equations may also need modifications to account for pair production of electron-positron pairs (or other particles at the highest temperatures). A plasma double layer with a large potential drop and layer separation, may accelerate electrons to relativistic velocities, and produce synchrotron