Tendrils of PlasmaNikhil PollardAward: Top 100
School: albany high school This is a photo of the arcs of plasma produced by a tesla coil discharging to ground. A tesla coil works by using a pair of tuned resonant coils to create a transformer. This creates high voltages at low currents as the primary coil, driven by a spark gap in my design, has few turns, and the secondary coil has hundreds of times as many turns. These coils are not physically connected, but transfer electricity via resonant inductive coupling. As power is pulsed into the primary coil, driven by the capacitor bank charging and then discharging across the spark gap, it creates a magnetic field oscillating at its resonant frequency, which is the same as the resonant frequency of the secondary coil. Because of this design, a charge is induced in the secondary coil with voltage increased proportional to the difference in turns, and current inversely proportional to the difference in turns. The result of this is an extremely high voltage at the topload of the secondary coil, with low current. At around 100 kilovolts, my coil is capable of producing an arc about 3.5 centimeters long, but with extremely low currents. Using a ⅙ second exposure, the camera captures many "tendrils" of plasma jumping from the topload to a set of 4 grounded rods, breaking through the resistance of air and ionizing it. Each tendril of plasma is a singular discharge cycle of the coil. 
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