Lightsaber: What would be the best material for recreating the iconic weapon?

A few decades ago, the lightsaber was featured in "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope." With the success of the franchise, it is clear that a large part of the public would like to have such a weapon, but would science be ready to make one?

With this idea in mind came the first attempts to reverse engineer the device. Research on photon agglutination had long shown how scientists could create a lightsaber.

What do we know about lightsabers? The films show brilliant 1.2 meter long weapons that contain a huge amount of energy and can quickly melt large amounts of metal. This suggests that they must have a powerful and compact power supply. In addition, they can cut through the skin (and the rest of the body) smoothly, but their wrists are not hot enough to injure their hand. Two lightsabers do not pass each other, and there are different colors of sparkling weapons.

Given the basic information, the first obvious thought is that perhaps lightsabers are a type of laser. While normal light is made up of photons that travel freely in all directions, the laser uses a light source and mirrors that retain and organize the photons, forming a concentrated beam of light. However, this assumption is easy to dismiss: lasers do not have a fixed length. Also, a laser has no mass, so it can't interact with matter - so it doesn't match the weapon in the movie.

Would they be plasma slides?

Perhaps the material that gets closer than desired is plasma, one of the gas-like physical states of matter in which a part of the particles is ionized. In plasma, atoms are so agitated that they lose electrons and become charged. You have seen examples of this substance all your life, such as fluorescent lamps.

Even though it looks really cool, you need to remember that the plasmas are very hot - in the thousands of degrees, which could cause a fire around you. Because it is electrically conductive, it can transmit a large electrical current to the target material, heating and melting it. Although such a device is called a "plasma cutter", it acts as a conductor that allows electrical current to flow through it.

Plasma torches can generate very hot regions, but electrical characteristics are problematic, mainly because of the need to have large amounts of current flow and, as we know, lightsabers do not appear to have this characteristic.

Would light sabers simply be ultra-hot plasma tubes? Not necessarily, since a plasma acts as a gas that expands and cools, and is like a normal fire. Therefore, if a plasma is the base technology for a lightsaber, it must be contained first.

But, fortunately, there is a mechanism to do this: Because plasma is made up of charged particles (some at very high speeds), it can be manipulated by magnetic fields. In fact, some of the most promising technologies involved in nuclear fusion research use magnetic fields to contain plasmas. Intense magnetic fields, coupled with a very hot and dense plasma, provide a combination that could be a candidate for creating a lightsaber.

However, if we had two magnetically contained plasma tubes, they could pass through each other - which would end any possibility of epic duels. To do this, we would need to find a way to make a solid core for sabers. In addition, the core material would need to be waterproof and withstand hot temperatures.

The gross power

The problems are not over yet: In "Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, " Obi-Wan cuts Ponda Baba's arm in the Mos Eisley canteen with a single blow. This sets some severe restrictions on how hot the plasma would have to be. Also, in "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace", Qui-Gon Jinn wields his lightsaber on a heavy security door, making a long cut and then simply melting it. Considering the door is steel and the time it took to heat and melt the material, it is possible to get a sense of how much energy the saber should have - somewhere around 20 megawatts.

There is yet another problem: the plasma would be so hot that even before anyone took the saber, his hand would be instantly sprayed.

Either way, even though it is not possible to make a lightsaber today, it is interesting to note how close science is to achieving an iconic science fiction technology.

* Posted on 12/23/2015

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