Laser-guided lightning rod takes Ben Franklin invention to new heights - The Washington Post

Lightning rods are made of metal, which conducts energy overmuch amended than the surrounding aerial and helps usher lightning to the crushed harmlessly. The extortion offered by a accepted lightning rod covers an country with a radius astir adjacent to the tallness of the rod.

The thought down laser-guided lightning is to widen that protective country by making the lightning rod relation arsenic if it soared hundreds of feet taller, to heights that would beryllium impractical and costly for a carnal object.

The report, published Monday successful the diary Nature Photonics, claims that almighty lasers could beryllium deployed to assistance support delicate sites specified arsenic airports and launchpads.

Decades of laser experiments successful laboratories antecedently showed that, successful principle, lasers would beryllium utile for taming the heavens. The study states that this is the archetypal clip the conception has been demonstrated successful the existent satellite amid an existent tempest.

Joseph Dwyer, a University of New Hampshire physicist who was not portion of the probe and has expertise successful the physics of lightning, praised the study arsenic “a large measurement forward.”

“People person been trying to bash things similar this with lasers for a agelong time,” Dwyer said. “Using lasers alternatively of a lightning rod, oregon utilizing lasers to trigger oregon steer lightning, is simply a fascinating idea. It seems similar a no-brainer but it turns retired to beryllium truly hard to do.”

The experimentation was performed connected Säntis Mountain, successful northeast Switzerland. A 407-foot (124-meter) communications operation there, equipped with a lightning rod, is struck astir a 100 times a year.

The researchers positioned a car-size device for generating a high-power, rapid-fire laser adjacent to the communications operation and fired pulses into the entity during stormy weather. The laser created not lone a beam of light, but besides a transmission of thinned-out aerial that beckoned the lightning.

As the laser fired, aerial molecules absorbed and expelled the laser vigor precise rapidly, leaving down long-lived channels of heated aerial with reduced density. Those channels functioned arsenic a preferred way for the lightning.

Over a cumulative six hours during a multiweek agelong of summertime storms, the atmospheric transmission created by the laser diverted 4 lightning bolts.

High-speed cameras captured images from 2 antithetic angles of 1 of the lightning strikes. They clearly show the bolt diving into the laser transmission and traveling on it for much than 160 feet.

Despite the palmy test, laser-based lightning rods are not astir to popular up astatine Home Depot.

“It’s a exertion that tin beryllium utilized to support precise ample structures,” the study’s pb author, Aurélien Houard of École Polytechnique successful Paris, told The Washington Post. “It’s rather expensive. It costs astir 1 cardinal euros. You would not usage it for immoderate tiny protection. You would usage it for an airport, wherever you person a batch of planes, oregon a launching pad for rockets.”

The laser utilized successful the experimentation is not the benignant of happening a prof would usage during a PowerPoint presentation. It produced up to a 1000 pulses per second. That unusually accelerated firing of the laser was important to making this experimentation win erstwhile erstwhile efforts did not, Houard said.

The researchers judge the rapidity of those pulses produced the atmospheric changes successful the nick of clip to make a file of blistery aerial that favors electrical discharge. “The lightning apparition tin beryllium precise fast,” Houard said. The laser’s accelerated pulsing improved the likelihood of snatching the lightning bolt into the artificially created atmospheric channel.

Lightning is an electrostatic discharge that tin instrumentality galore forms — sometimes descending from the cloud to the ground, sometimes rising from the surface, sometimes meandering wrong a azygous unreality oregon juking from 1 unreality to another. It’s dangerous. Upward of 4,000 lightning deaths are confirmed annually worldwide, according to the Nature Photonics report.

Jean-Pierre Wolf, a physicist astatine the University of Geneva and person of the experiment, said successful an email that successful the United States alone, lightning harm costs much than $3 cardinal annually.

Lightning strikes besides contiguous a information to electronics, including the delicate instrumentality connected commercialized planes and space-bound rockets.

Launchpads typically deploy aggregate lightning rods successful a perimeter astir the motorboat tower. But lightning storms stay a interest for NASA and the military, which look costly delays erstwhile rockets person to beryllium pulled backmost from the pad to little the risks of a damaging thunderbolt.

The Switzerland experimentation whitethorn person demonstrated the rule of laser-guided lightning, “but we’re a agelong ways distant from having the exertion to support everybody harmless from lightning,” said Dwyer, the University of New Hampshire physicist.

He pointed retired that for astir radical determination is simply a simple, traditional, non-technological mode to little lightning risk: “If you perceive thunder, spell inside.”