Make grape plasma in magnetic feild?

[ForumFire]

There are many videos on youtube where people put grapes in the microwave and it turned the grapes into plasma. There are some other videos on youtube where someone made a plasma thruster(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_wwEKp6SGk"), and in the discription said that it needed a magnetic field for it to work. In some of the comments it said that if it where in microwaves it would work too. I was wondering if a grape would turn into plasma if it was in a magnetic field?

 

[Topher925]

I don't have an answer to your question but my intuition tells me that a normal kitchen microwave doesn't have the energy to turn a grape into plasma. I've tried some of these grape experiments with my 1200watt microwave and could never get them to work.

It is possible to create plasma from a gas using electromagnetic fields. That is the method they use for fusion in tokomaks but I doubt you could produce plasma in a microwave but I could be wrong. In the context that the video is referring to, you would actually be making any plasma from the magnetic field itself but just be able to control it. Plasma responds well to electromagnetic fields to due the atoms electrons being stripped.

EDIT: I just watched the video and it doesn't look like any plasma thruster I have ever seen. Looks more like a fluorescent light bulb experiment.