Can a Charge Configuration with Extreme Excess Charge be Stable?

It is shown that a special case of a system of this kind in the form of a charged spherical shell with powerful excess charge may exhibit violent such oscillations, effectively freezing it from expansion and thus in principle showing a counter-intuitive stability, albeit presumably short-lived. This effect may possibly have a bearing on, e g, some types of ball lightning observations, and is here also discussed in relation to the virial theorem, which traditionally is considered to exclude stable, localised electromagnetic configurations of this type. The oscillation frequency obtained for confinement of the type discussed in the article agrees well with what has been shown in laboratory experiments using microwaves to produce stationary luminous plasmoids in test tubes.

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