Nature Article on Currents in the Cosmos

This points out that all that plasma activity is indirect evidence of powerful charge flows running throughout the universe and underestimation is not helpful.

Certainly their obseerved actuvty informed the work at focus fusion.

We are a long way from mastery here and simple is a likely mistake. Larger is also likely better.

Nature Article on Currents in the Cosmos

May 20, 2026

Focus Fusion

The plasma theories that guide LPPFusion’s research have in large part been based on observations of plasma in nature on the large scales of the cosmos. A key phenomenon both in these plasmas and in our FF-2B device is the formation of plasma filaments—dense vortices of electric current and magnetic fields that pull plasmas into them like electric tornadoes. The study of these filaments was pioneered by Noble Laureate Hannes Alfven and his colleague Carl-Gunne Falthammar. Based on this work, Lerner developed quantitative theories both of the functioning of dense plasma focus devices like FF-2B and of various cosmic phenomena.

Over the past few decades, more and more researchers have observed and tried to understand these filaments and the magnetic fields that confine the plasma within them. Unfortunately, much less attention has been paid to the electric currents that generate, and are guided by these magnetic fields. As Alfven pointed out as early as the 1970’s, simplified mathematical models of plasmas which are relatively easy to use in computer simulations ignore the electric currents. They calculate the magnetic fields as if they were produced by a sloshing of an abstract fluid. In fact, in reality magnetic fields are produced only by electric currents or by rapid changes in electric fields.

Alfven was particularly aggravated that the misused mathematical models, termed magnetohydrodynamic or MHD, were his own invention, intended to approximately model very dense, unmagnetized plasma in stars like our sun. They were totally inapplicable to the highly magnetized plasms of space or fusion devices. He used his 1970 Nobel address to assail this misuse of his work. However, the convenience of the MDH approximation still tempted many researchers to use it in many applications where it was totally wrong.

But in recent years, more researchers have started to use non-MHD simulations and analysis to study the magnetic filaments and in the process recognize the importance of the electric currents generating the fields. One of the most prominent examples of this approach, aligning with the work of Alfven, Lerner, and colleagues, was a paper published in the January 21, 2026 issue of Nature, the world’s leading scientific journal. Titled “Large-scale dynamos driven by shear-flow-induced jets” by B. Tripathi (now at Columbia University) and colleagues, the simulations show how tiny filaments, here called “jets”, can grow rapidly into large-scale vortex filaments with electric currents, magnetic fields and plasma flows all aligned with each other. The paper explicitly showed the central role of currents in Figure 4 a (Reproduced here in our fig.2)

Figure 2. This figure from “Large-scale dynamos driven by shear-flow-induced jets” in Nature (Jan. 21, 2026) shows the formation of large-scale filaments of current (right-hand chart) that are precisely aligned with the motion of plasma in the filaments (left-hand chart). Vorticity is a measure of the spin of a fluid, so high vorticity regions are along the central axes of vortex filaments.

The prominence of this paper will help encourage more current-based modeling by other researchers. Such simulations can be used in the future to make more detailed predictions about filaments both in fusion devices and cosmic phenomena than are possible with LPPFusion’s rougher calculations and simpler simulations. However, these supercomputer-based simulations do require significant resources of both researchers’ time and of money for computer time.