Notes by Akshat Jiwan Sharma

Air plasma driven high temperature blackbody light emitter for lighting and display applications  ABSTRACT  Plasma based light sources are usually based on noble gasses relying on emission from atomic lines to display colors. Whereas blackbody based emitters rely on the temperature of the emitter for the color and intensity of light. Neither BB nor plasma emitters by themselves are capable of producing light efficiently, BB emitters being especially notorious for their low efficiency. Yet the simplicity in manufacturing of plasma & BB light sources presents a compelling argument in their favor if their efficiency could be increased. In this paper we explore why these emitters suffer from poor efficiency and present a novel light emitter that combines the properties of plasmas and blackbodies to create a light source emitting at 5800K — the temperature of the surface of the sun offering both high luminous efficacy and wall plug efficiencies greater than 40% — exceeding the ...

A question asked on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1n02vlg/ Yes and this has been experimentally confirmed. Shock compression of water has produced different forms of ice crystals.  SOME REFERENCES Experimental evidence for superionic water ice using shock compression https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-017-0017-4 This particular form of ice melted at 5000K at 200Gpa.  https://www.llnl.gov/article/44081/first-experimental-evidence-superionic-ice An interesting tidbit from the research is in this paragraph  >Using diamond anvil cells (DAC), the team applied 2.5 GPa of pressure (25 thousand atmospheres) to pre-compress water into the room-temperature ice VII, a cubic crystalline form that is different from "ice-cube" hexagonal ice, in addition to being 60 percent denser than water at ambient pressure and temperature.  I'm not really sure at what temp this compression was performed but ice vii is known to exist at room temp at high enough pre...

22 Aug 2025 It was an honor to participate in the 28th foundation day of the center for civil society. As one of the leading think tanks it has helped shape policy through its research and engagement with experts and policy makers. The panelists presented their views on the topic of 'Decriminalization for development' where they argued that too stringent compliance policy may be hurting the entrepreneurial spirit and that the goal of ease of doing business can't be realised until risk taking is encouraged. Special mention was made of insolvency laws where founders often lose control of their organisation in contrast to the laws of other countries where focus is on business recovery rather than handing over the power to the creditors. It was argued that compliance is easy for big businesses but smaller orgs may need a more supportive ecosystem that nurtures their growth. I was in general agreement. It is important to build trust, focus on partnerships and continue to develop...

14 Aug 2025 Happy to participate in the Future of Mobility Investments at IIT Delhi and learn about the perspective of investors & the thought process that goes into making investment decisions in technologies like electric vehicles. Over the last decade EV tech has matured and has proven itself to be reliable and efficient. Challenges however remain with respect to battery materials (cobalt and lithium both are costly and rare while copper supply is increasingly being strained although it may yet prove to be resilient). A more serious concern is that of long charging times associated with EV. Silicon based chargers have been pushed to their limits. Wide band gap semiconductors could replace them but rarity of Gallium and difficulty in scaling the leyly process for manufacturing of much more abundant Silicon carbide could present a tough barrier for engineers. EV works but manufacturing vehicles and associated components leads to huge technical complexity (literally semiconductor g...

Electrostatically generated bubble assisted patterning at micro and nanoscale ABSTRACT Surface patterning at the micro and nanoscale is critical in areas like microelectronics, photonics, biosensing, and materials science. A variety of techniques have been developed to produce these patterns. The majority of these techniques are lithographic; they transfer patterns on a substrate making them highly sophisticated and complex, but inflexible. Machines are locked into a pattern size and are unable to deviate from the parameters they have been designed with.  Here we investigate if bubbles,which have long been known to cause surface pitting on metals ,ceramics and polymers, can be used to carefully and precisely pattern a substrate on nano and microscale.  Electrostatic nucleation and detonation of bubbles is evaluated as a possible technique that can satisfy stringent requirements of nucleating and collapsing nanosized bubbles. Bubble size can be modulated through electric fields...