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Earth Science

High-Powered Lasers Can Be Used To Steer Lightning Strikes 57

Posted by BeauHD from the laser-guided dept.
fahrbot-bot shares a report from Engadget: Lightning rods have been used to safely guide strikes into the ground since Benjamin Franklin's day, but their short range (roughly the same radius as the height) and fixed-in-place design makes them ineffective for protecting large areas. The technology may finally be here to replace them in some situations. European researchers have successfully tested a system that uses terawatt-level laser pulses to steer lighting toward a 26-foot rod. It's not limited by its physical height, and can cover much wider areas -- in this case, 590 feet -- while penetrating clouds and fog.

["The experiment was performed on Santis Mountain, in northeast Switzerland," adds The Washington Post. "A 407-foot (124-meter) communications tower there, equipped with a lightning rod, is struck roughly a hundred times a year."] The design ionizes nitrogen and oxygen molecules, releasing electrons and creating a plasma that conducts electricity. As the laser fires at a very quick 1,000 pulses per second, it's considerably more likely to intercept lightning as it forms. In the test, conducted between June and September 2021, lightning followed the beam for nearly 197 feet before hitting the rod. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Photonics. A video of the work has also been published on YouTube.
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High-Powered Lasers Can Be Used To Steer Lightning Strikes More

High-Powered Lasers Can Be Used To Steer Lightning Strikes

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  • 11 min video - let me save you some time (Score:5, Informative)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @09:35PM (#63215028)

    I just scrubbed through the darn thing - twice - and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to include a single example of this actually happening.

    • ...but the journal article does contain photos and a nice explanation.

    • So, unless you're fluent in French or really enjoy reading subtitles slowly explaining the same thing you can glean from the article, don't bother. The gist of it is already in TFS: laser ionizes air, which then conducts electricity.

      If you want to watch someone actually play around with lasers and big ass electric arcs, I recommend this crazy guy. [youtube.com]

    • It's like how the Electrolaser [wikipedia.org] works.

      • Well thank you for that - I was aware of the tetanizing beam weapon concept, but I didn't know the common name had changed to electrolaser/LIPC.

        I thought the projects had been discontinued because of the high energy requirements and the nice big purple line leading back to the point of origin. Now there's more reading to do!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rahmrh ( 939610 )

      I thought it was widely known that high powered lasers ionized the air. And given that a lightening bolt coming back to down that ionized path is not exactly a surprise.

      The only exercise left to prove was what frequency works best, and how much power does it really need to work.

      The biggest issue may be that high powered laser hitting something in the air that it should not hit (a bird, a plane, superman)

  • May have some application to space to ground power transmission?

    • Depends on how energy-intensive it is to establish and maintain ion channels.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by vlad30 ( 44644 )
      More Likely as a weapon direct the laser at a target from space and let the lightning do the work, or create a weapon the creates lightning that follows the lasers path

      • Somebody's been reading their Supervillain Manuals. Now, if you can find a way to include sharks with the lasers, you'd be on to something.

    • Naw, the potential differences would be insane.

      We know photon wavelenghs that transmit through the atmosphere with little loss already.

  • Finally a low cost, low power, easy to implement solution to lightning strikes. It must be terrible having to replace all the equipment on that Santis Mountain radio tower, one hundred times per year.

    • Ummm how low-cost are we talking? The experiment cost over $2 billion. But you know, early stages and all that.

      • Re:Oh good... (Score:4, Funny)

        by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @01:31AM (#63215468)

        Ummm how low-cost are we talking? The experiment cost over $2 billion. But you know, early stages and all that.

        The main expense is the dead volcano mountain complex, with the submarine base, amazing control room, trap doors in the office, and all the support staff and paramilitary. And tape drives.

        • Oh well in that case. Sharks too.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by cstacy ( 534252 )

            Oh well in that case. Sharks too.

            The shark food is essentially free; it's a rounding error in the Personnel cost center.

            • The shark food is essentially free; it's a rounding error in the Personnel cost center.

              I mean missing the last step and stumbling is bad enough, but finishing up a 13 hour work day doing your rounds and suddenly you’re shark food.

            • Just make sure MI6 agents visit frequently enough, then the tax payer funds the food expense.

          • Shark food is covered by employee chum ... I mean churn!

  • just need an monster the hook the rod to!

  • "Whoa dude, what if we like.. used laser beams to bend lighting or something?", but then went thru the "wait, we can actually do that" step

  • The whole point of lightning rods is to allow any static charge dissipate so that the lightning does not strike what the lightning rod is attached to. Here they are trying to attract the lightning.

    If they are going to do that then they should at least try to "break even" in the energy balance and try to use the enormous amount of energy in that lightning to somehow power the laser. It may not be possible to store that much energy, but it would be fun to try! Tesla would have loved this device, if it didn't

    • Re:The point of lighning rods (Score:4, Informative)

      by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 ) on Monday January 16, 2023 @11:56PM (#63215330) Homepage

      The whole point of lightning rods is to allow any static charge dissipate so that the lightning does not strike what the lightning rod is attached to.

      Hmmm that's not what other sources say.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      https://www.britannica.com/tec... [britannica.com]
      https://www.weather.gov/safety... [weather.gov]

      According to these articles, lightning rods are intended to provide a low-resistance path to the ground for the lightning strike, in essence, attracting the lightning strike to itself.

      • The whole point of lightning rods is to allow any static charge dissipate so that the lightning does not strike what the lightning rod is attached to.

        His wording is a little unusual, but he is saying the same thing. You attach a lightning rod to the top of the CN tower so the lightning hits the lightning rod rather than the tower itself. Same with a church steeple. You want the lightning to have a safe path to ground through the external wire rather than through the structure or electrical wiring inside the building.

        • The OP then goes on to contrast lightning rods with these new rods:

          Here they are trying to attract the lightning

          This clarifies the intent. Lightning rods are indeed intended to attract lightning to themselves.

          • Also they don’t always work. I was staying at a condo in Florida, it has a lightning rod to avoid damage from strikes. But when one storm came through, lightning hit the corner of the building and boiled some water in a crack or something dislodging about a 5’ by 5’ by 1’ concrete corner chunk from the buildings roof edge. Fell about 12 stories all the way to the lawn. Luckily no one or anything of value was underneath.

            • Luckily no one or anything of value was underneath.

              Of course not, it happened in Florida.

            • Of course, nothing *always* works. There can be flaws in the design or implementation. This does not take away from the effectiveness of lightning rods, nor does it argue that they don't "attract" lightning strikes.

              • There is no flaw in the design, and the video and basic literature explain it poorly. Having the end of the rod higher than everything else only creates an area of substantially less likely to be hit, not zero. Common belief is it does provide 100% protection.

                • I would call " 100% effective" to be a kind of flaw.

                  • "less than 100%"

                    • I don’t see it as a design flaw, rather it’s just very simple, compact, and inexpensive compared to other designs. It’s a common misconception that electricity takes the path of least resistance, nothing could be further from the truth as electricity has the quantum like macroscopic effect of taking all paths simultaneously. In fact the first thing 101 you learn in electrical engineering is the parallel resistance equivalence formula, which just says high resistance (say gigaohm or highe
      • The reason for the sharp tip is used to magnify the electric field gradient at the tip, which then allows ions to flow thus dissipating the charge of the area surrounding the lightning rod with respect to the surrounding environment. If you dissipate some of the charge that is building up then it is a lot less likely to discharge to the ground in that location, as some other area will usually have a greater charge differential and the built up charge there will cause a discharge in a location other than the

        • Do you have a source?

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by hAckz0r ( 989977 )

            Charge Transfer is what some call it

            https://www.lightningprotection.com/charge-transfer-technology/

            It is debatable as to how much is charege transfer is enough or whether it is nearly enough to make a difference considering the enormous amount of charge generated in an average storm. Dissipating any differential in charge will simply make that lightning bolt less likely to hit where it is partially dissipated and a little more likely to hit somewhere else. I don't see any specific tests on the statistical s

    • If they are going to do that then they should at least try to "break even" ...

      I think the financial benefit is not having to pay to repair/replace things destroyed by the lightning. Sure it's a terawatt laser, but it pulsed quickly for a short time so don't know how much power it actually uses in operation. I imagine the cost of the electricity is less than fixing, say, a communications tower, etc... Still, you have a point that capturing the power from the lightning strike would be a bonus, but don't know what that would require -- probably something with a large capacity that c

  • I have a few dozen of those laying around in my barn.
    With electricity getting expensive these days, I'm hesitant turning them on for a few milliseconds.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TrixX ( 187353 )

      They turn them on in *picosecond* pulses, about 1000 of them per second. That means that a single millisecond of total operation will happen after 11 days of continuous operation, and they most likely will turn this on only during an electrical thunderstorm rather than all the time. If you do the matt it's about 1W of power usage.

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • They'll be turned to vapor a second or so after you fire it by the 10,000 amps that poor down from, (or fly up to,) the sky.

      The first person to mention hole flow is getting struck.

  • Couldn't they have just asked Iroh or Zuko to redirect the lightning?

  • It was kosher space lasers causing the lightning strikes in the forests of California afterall!

  • I came here to see the dolphins with frickin lasers comments. Can someone please explain why I haven't found any ?

    Thanks.

    Please don't mod me down, it's a serious question...

  • Can it be used to power a flux capacitor? (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @11:04AM (#63216552)

    After all 1.21 Gigawatt could also power up a few normal cars.

  • New sci-fi weapon idea (Score:3)

    by lazlo ( 15906 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2023 @11:16AM (#63216604) Homepage

    Now imagine this in reverse, a drone with an onboard laser that lurks in the clouds, using static electricity buildup as a force multiplier to rain destruction on ground targets.

    Probably completely impractical, but great for a sci-fi war movie.

  • Doesn't the low-resistance path created by the laser end up drawing the lightning towards the laser itself? Posts above mention that sometimes lightning rods get direct hits and are destroyed, but these lasers are a lot more expensive. I didn't see any mention of protection for the laser, like firing through a small hole in a thick metal shield.
  • Very practical. I'll take two, in fact. One to shit on and one to cover it up with, as my grandpa would say...

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