I have chosen plasma for my PBL project. For my ELA connection I will complete my research about plasma to my teacher, while adding it as a document under my PBL website.
I started by getting to understand my project by playing and observing it, this let's me see how the lightning from the plasma globe looks like and how it's created inside the glass.
The plasma globe consists of a partially evacuated glass sphere containing a mixture of inert gases. The smaller glass sphere at the center contains a power source similar to a Tesla coil. It supplies an alternating, high voltage, high frequency, yet small current to the inner sphere.
Next, I begin to touch the glass of the globe and I see that the lightning is following my finger, and determined that this reaction is similar to earth's lightning.
Most lightning is an electrical discharge between oppositely charged parts of clouds. The kind we
are most familiar with is the electrical discharge between the clouds and the oppositely charged ground below.
Finally, I place a fluorescent light bulb next to the plasma globe. When it was close enough to the globe I see that the fluorescent light bulb lit up for what I saw is that plasma gives off a lot of energy.
So, what is happening with your fluorescent bulbs in the vicinity of that plasma sphere is that the high-frequency electromagnetic waves are just strong enough to free some of the weekly held electrons from the charge centers and start them wandering around their mostly-insulating surroundings, accumulating enough total energy to give off a visible photon as they do so. The pigments in fluorescent lights are specifically chosen to allow fairly easy recombination, e.g. within a few milliseconds.
However, even those materials retain a certain percentage of electrons that manage to get totally hosed and not find their ways back to positive charge centers for several minutes.