Mircea Sanduloviciu

Mircea Sanduloviciu (January 15, 1928 - November 19, 2018) was a Romanian plasma physicist who studied ball lightning and detailed the emergence of self-organising, cell-like plasmas under laboratory conditions.

Selected Papers

 * &mdash; "The genesis and characteristics of ball lightning are explained in the frame of a new self-organization physical scenario suggested by laboratory investigations of formation and stability of self-consistent extended macroscopic space charge configurations. These are known as fireballs in dc gas discharges and as plasmoids in gas discharges sustained by a radio frequency electric field. We justify the proposed explanation with a test experiment able to simulate step by step, under controllable laboratory conditions, the succession of physical processes whose final product is a gaseous stable flaming globe revealing characteristics usually attributed to ball lightning. Although involving energies much lower than that developed in the Earth's atmosphere during thunderstorms, the described experimental simulation evidences that self-organization is, very probably, the most suitable natural phenomenon able to explain the ball lightning appearance."
 * &mdash; "A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The described phenomenology, justified by laboratory experiments, is essentially based on local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The complexity represents a primitive organism self-assembled in a gaseous medium revealing, immediately after its 'birth', many of the prerequisite features that attribute them the quality to evolve, under suitable conditions, into a living cell."
 * &mdash; "The genesis and characteristics of ball lightning are explained in the frame of a new self-organization physical scenario suggested by laboratory investigations of formation and stability of self-consistent extended macroscopic space charge configurations. These are known as fireballs in dc gas discharges and as plasmoids in gas discharges sustained by a radio frequency electric field. We justify the proposed explanation with a test experiment able to simulate step by step, under controllable laboratory conditions, the succession of physical processes whose final product is a gaseous stable flaming globe revealing characteristics usually attributed to ball lightning. Although involving energies much lower than that developed in the Earth's atmosphere during thunderstorms, the described experimental simulation evidences that self-organization is, very probably, the most suitable natural phenomenon able to explain the ball lightning appearance."
 * &mdash; "A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The described phenomenology, justified by laboratory experiments, is essentially based on local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The complexity represents a primitive organism self-assembled in a gaseous medium revealing, immediately after its 'birth', many of the prerequisite features that attribute them the quality to evolve, under suitable conditions, into a living cell."
 * &mdash; "A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The described phenomenology, justified by laboratory experiments, is essentially based on local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The complexity represents a primitive organism self-assembled in a gaseous medium revealing, immediately after its 'birth', many of the prerequisite features that attribute them the quality to evolve, under suitable conditions, into a living cell."
 * &mdash; "A phenomenological model of self-organization explaining the emergence of a complexity with features that apparently satisfy the specific criteria usually required for recognizing the appearance of life in laboratory is presented. The described phenomenology, justified by laboratory experiments, is essentially based on local self-enhancement and long-range inhibition. The complexity represents a primitive organism self-assembled in a gaseous medium revealing, immediately after its 'birth', many of the prerequisite features that attribute them the quality to evolve, under suitable conditions, into a living cell."