By IANS,
Washington : Scientists successfully triggered electrical activity for the first time by shooting pulses of laser light into thunderclouds from atop a New Mexico peak.
Engineering such strikes will permit scientists to evaluate and test lightning-sensitivity of airplanes and critical infrastructure like power lines.
Pulsed lasers represent a potentially powerful tool for such lightning because they can form a large number of plasma filaments that act like conducting wires extending into the thundercloud.
Although the idea of using lasers for the purpose has been around for more than 30 years, lasers too weak to generate long plasma channels stymied efforts of scientists.
The current generation of more powerful lasers, developed by Jérôme Kasparian of University of Lyons (France), is likely to overcome this limitation.
“This was an important first step toward triggering lightning strikes with laser beams,” said Kasparian. The next step may come, he added, after the team reprograms their lasers to use more sophisticated pulse sequences that will make longer-lived filaments to further conduct the lightning during storms.
Kasparian and his colleagues are involved in the Teramobile project, initiated by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in France and the German Research Foundation (DFG).
The findings have been published in the latest issue of Optics Express.