Laser-guided lightning

Lightning discharges cause substantial damage and fatalities worldwide. We demonstrate, for the first time in the field, that laser-induced filaments formed by short, intense laser pulses can guide lightning over considerable distances. In a 2021 campaign on Säntis mountain (Switzerland) using a high-repetition-rate terawatt laser, guidance of an upward negative lightning leader over 50 m was captured by two high-speed cameras. Additional events showed guidance signatures in very-high-frequency (VHF) interferometric measurements, and guided events exhibited a marked increase in X-ray bursts. These results provide the first experimental evidence of laser-guided lightning in nature, paving the way toward laser-based lightning protection for airports, launchpads and large infrastructures, and advancing lightning physics.

Aurélien Houard, Pierre Walch, Thomas Produit, Victor Moreno, Benoit Mahieu, Antonio Sunjerga, Clemens Herkommer, Amirhossein Mostajabi, Ugo Andral, Yves-Bernard André, Magali Lozano, Laurent Bizet, Malte C. Schroeder, Guillaume Schimmel, Michel Moret, Mark Stanley, W. A. Rison, Oliver Maurice, Bruno Esmiller, Knut Michel, Walter Haas, Thomas Metzger, Marcos Rubinstein, Farhad Rachidi, Vernon Cooray, André Mysyrowicz, Jérôme Kasparian, Jean-Pierre Wolf