Electric events synchronized with laser filaments in thunderclouds

Jérôme Kasparian (1, 2) , Roland Ackermann (1) , Yves-Bernard André (3) , Grégoire Méchain (3) , Guillaume Méjean (1, 4) , Bernard Prade (3) , Philipp Rohwetter (5) , Estelle Salmon (1) , Kamil Stelmaszczyk (5) , Jin Yu (1) , André Mysyrowicz (3) , Roland Sauerbrey (6) , Ludger Woeste (7, 5) , Jean-Pierre Wolf (2)

1 LASIM - Laboratoire de Spectrométrie Ionique et Moléculaire
2 GAP - Group of Applied Physics [Geneva]
3 LOA - Laboratoire d'optique appliquée
4 LIPhy - Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire de Physique [Saint Martin d’Hères]
5 Institut für Experimentalphysik
6 HZDR - Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf
7 Freie Universität Berlin

We investigated the possibility to trigger real-scale lightning using ionized filaments generated by ultrashort laser pulses in the atmosphere. Under conditions of high electric field during two thunderstorms, we observed a statistically significant number of electric events synchronized with the laser pulses, at the location of the filaments. This observation suggests that corona discharges may have been triggered by filaments.

Keywords: Atmospheric and Oceanic Optics

Domains: Physics [physics]; Physics [physics]; Optics [physics.optics]

Jérôme Kasparian, Roland Ackermann, Yves-Bernard André, Grégoire Méchain, Guillaume Méjean, et al.. Electric events synchronized with laser filaments in thunderclouds. Optics Express, 2008, 16 (8), pp.5757. ⟨10.1364/OE.16.005757⟩. ⟨hal-00455170⟩