Like a high-tech hammer of Thor, a powerful laser can grab hold of a lightning bolt and reroute its path through the sky.
Scientists have used lasers to wrangle electricity in the lab before. But researchers now offer the first proof that this can also work in real-world storms. Their tests took place on a Swiss mountaintop. Someday, they say, it could lead to better protection against lightning.
The most common anti-lightning tech is the lightning rod: a metal pole rooted to the ground. Because metal conducts electricity, it lures in lightning that might otherwise strike nearby buildings or people. The rod can then safely feed that electricity into the ground. But the area shielded by a lightning rod is limited by the rod’s height.
“If you want to protect some large infrastructure, like an airport or a launching pad for rockets or a wind farm … then you would need, for good protection, a lightning rod of kilometer size, or hundreds of meters,” says Aurélien Houard. A physicist, he works at Institut Polytechnique de Paris. He’s based in Palaiseau, France.
Building a metal rod a kilometer (or mile) high would be tough. But a laser could reach that far. It could snag distant lightning bolts out of the sky and guide them down to ground-based metal rods. In the summer of 2021, Houard was part of a team that tested this idea atop the Säntis mountain in Switzerland.
A laser lightning rod
The team set up a high-power laser near a tower used for telecommunications. That tower is tipped by a lightning rod that is struck by lightning some 100 times per year. The laser was beamed at the sky during thunderstorms for a total of about six hours.
The laser blasted intense bursts of infrared…
Read the full article here