Professor Eggleston performs experimental research on plasmas, the charged gases sometimes referred to as the fourth state of matter. Since coming to Oxy he has, together with his undergraduate assistants, designed and built three plasma devices and published work on plasma vortices and particle transport in non-neutral plasma traps. Prior to joining the faculty of Occidental College, he was a research physicist at the San Diego campus of the University of California. His studies there focused on plasma waves and instabilities in pure electron plasmas and their effect on particle transport. During his Ph.D. studies at UCLA he worked on a number of problems dealing with the interaction of electromagnetic waves with a spatially inhomogeneous plasma. These studies included laboratory experiments, numerical solutions of nonlinear differential equations, and field experiments at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.
While plasmas are rare in our terrestrial environment (exceptions include sparks, lightning bolts and fluorescent light bulbs), they are ubiquitous in the rest of the universe. In the laboratory they are typically produced in an evacuated vessel and confined using electric and magnetic fields. Research in plasma physics is motivated by a number of applications including controlled fusion power, advanced industrial processing of materials, and the storage of anti-matter.
