Lasers can guide lightning!

[Curiously_Coherent]

Here's a interesting article about a group of scientists who actually use lasers to create "plasma filaments" that attract and guide lightning. Needs a lot of juice, but it raises some interesting scenarios... Which I shall, um... not discuss here in order not to incriminate myself... hehehe [smiley=evil.gif]

Here's the link here.

Cheers, CC

 

[Helioplasma]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

UV lasers Ionize well the air, but this method is also used in energy directed weapons to induce electricity for house security. But having it to draw lightning would require quite a collimation !!  

 

[Switch]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

They say it will only be possible to create a lighting down a beam.....But the 3D scanner comes to mind It would just have to "draw" a path of plasma dots into the air from the cloud to the target and ZAP! Pretty cool seems possible....

 

[rog8811]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

It sort of brings the kite, the key and a founding father into the modern world.

Regards rog8811

 

[Switch]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

It sort of brings the kite, the key and a founding father into the modern world.

Regards rog8811

Yea....getting lightninged yourself is that easy, you don't need a laser and plasma filaments.My 3d lightning striker is a good idea : ;D it could be called "the ZEUS laser"
If highpowered UV pulses focused to a pinpoint in the air is what is required, a good N[sub]2[/sub] laser and some good optics should go a long way It would be a neat experiment to see if you could get an HV spark jump a huge gap with the help of a TEA laser...

 

[likewhat]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

UV lasers Ionize well the air, but this method is also used in energy directed weapons to induce electricity for house security. But having it to draw lightning would require quite a collimation !!

Actually once your laser gets to a sufficiently high power it can propagate in air or plasma without diverging. That is why they were talking about filaments.

 

[VillageIdiot]

great, now we're going to have electrified planes on our hands ;D

 

[Things]

Nothing to worry about with the electrical planes ;D ;D The lasers required to do this sort of thing range into the megawatt range, out of reach for the average hobbyist.

 

[Things]

BTW they arent making "plasma filiments", but more just ionising the air in a trail. before lightning strickes, it creates a ionised trail that it follows, the laser is just doing that part already. This wold be kind of dangerous though, considering the lightning would be attrached to the laser itself ;D

 

[Switch]

Re: Lasers can giude lightning!

[quote author=Helioplasma link=1208273443/0#1 date=1208274649]UV lasers Ionize well the air, but this method is also used in energy directed weapons to induce electricity for house security. But having it to draw lightning would require quite a collimation !!  

Actually once your laser gets to a sufficiently high power it can propagate in air or plasma without diverging. That is why they were talking about filaments. [/quote]
How come ? :-/ Can we still have our mythical 0Rad laser?

Anyway, here's a rough diagram of my theory, can this be done with a home made laser? Or can it be done at all? :-/

 

[Things]

Chances are you dont have a powerful enough laser to do it. Must be a pretty powerful laser, its hooked up to the HV PSU ;D ;D ;D The thing is, the laser ionises a TINY point of air, and in that drawing, the dot of so called plasma, is alot bigger than it would be IRL. That drawing isnt very accurate, since the spark wouldnt be initiated with the tiny amout of ionised air, unless is was just on the edge of sparking..

 

[likewhat]

In order to this you need a laser that is powerful enough to create filaments, which usually means it is over a terawatt. These filaments are where the laser self focuses and propagates [highlight]without divergence[/highlight]. When this happens the laser is intense enough that it will ionize the air it is passing through (which is part of where the self focusing comes from). The laser can propagate like this for 10s or 100s of meters creating a short lived ionized channel. In areas of high electric field the free electrons can then be accelerated and lead to an avalanche breakdown of the air, which is what lightning is.

 

[Switch]

LOL, it's not hooked up to the HV source but to the laser driver ;D And the ball is just a representation of the visible glow that would occur not the actual volume of ionized air.
I was talking about something like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HHJhpStza0&feature=related eventhough a lot of people are saying it's fake, then again some people say you're throwing razorblades at balloons when they actually pop Anyway, the point would be to use a laser to draw an arc that wouldn't normally jump that far

likewhat, the phenomenon you speak of is very fascinating, and I'm guessing totally beyond me :-[ I'll try to find some stuff on laser induced plasma filaments.