Lightsaber Physics
This has nothing directly to do with Force Awakens (and please don't spoil the movie in the comments), but I was thinking about lightsaber physics and wanted to share.
Most of the time, people seem to think lightsabers are looped lasers or plasma (the image on the far left), but the more I think about it, I actually believe that lightsabers use a blade-shaped containment field that's filled with plasma (the center image). If they were just beams, then lightsabers would be super skinny to the naked eye, and also appear to intersect when they hit another lightsaber.
If it's a containment field (something that exists in Star Wars in various shapes and sizes already), it explains why their surfaces "touch" instead of the beams intersecting. It also explains why Kylo Ren's lightsaber looks kind of wobbly: it just has a less stable containment field. It may also be that the color of a lightsaber is actually the color of the field rather than the plasma, and that a lightsaber's crystal is what determines the spectrum of the field.
This would also explain why lightsabers don't seem to be super hot unless you physically touch them. Only when you come in contact with the field are you going to be burned by the heat of the plasma.
I was going to take a day off from work, but then this happened instead...
Comments (4)
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Containment field would also explain why lightsabers can work underwater, but why Qui-Gon had to activate his lightsaber outside of the blastshield. The containment field can displace air and water molecules, but not denser arrangements without the plasma.
The "loop" doesn't need to necessarily be in the form of "filament of plasma goes from one small hole to another," it would be more like a fountain, as EdZ said. And yeah, a containment field is pretty necessary if you want plasma to actually cycle back through the fountain instead of just spraying everywhere.
I've always assumed the 'loop' was not a skinny filament, but a very stretched toroid: plasma is squirted up the outside wall, and returns down a narrow core. With the plasma emitting light, you'd never see the hollow core even if you were to look straight down the blade.