Laser beams may control path of lightning

Scientists have found how to use lasers to guide electric discharges and steer them around obstacles, a finding that may allow humans to control the path of lightning.
Lightning dart across the sky in a flash. And even though we can use lightning rods to increase the probability of it striking at a specific location, its exact path remains unpredictable.
At a smaller scale, discharges between two electrodes behave in the same manner, streaking through space to create electric arcs where only the start and end points are fixed.
Using the Advanced Laser Light Source (ALLS) facility, researchers from the INRS Energie Materiaux Telecommunications research centre in Quebec have found a way to guide electric discharges - and even steer them around obstacles - through the clever use of lasers.

Electric arcs have long been used in technologies such as combustion engines, pollution control applications, lighting, machining and micromachining.
Potential applications could multiply with the ability to precisely control the path they take, researchers said.

A first step in this direction has been made and research into the new possibilities and parameters for guiding electric arcs promises to spark researchers' creativity.
Researchers demonstrated an electric charge follow a smooth path along a straight or parabolic trajectory.
Experimental figures show how different shaped lasers give discharges distinct properties and trajectories.
By combining beams, it is even possible to achieve an S-shaped trajectory, with all other kinds of trajectory achievable in principle.

Professor Roberto Morandotti wanted to determine whether the self-healing properties of certain shapes of laser beams (such as Airy and Bessel beams) could be put to use in these new experiments.
This attribute means that a laser beam whose intensity peak is blocked by an obstacle can reconstruct itself once past the object, researchers said.
Morandotti's team placed an object between the two electrodes and observed that the discharge leapt over the obstacle, without damaging it, and returned to its laser guide on the other side.
"Our fascination with lightning and electric arcs aside, this scientific discovery holds out significant potential and opens up new fields of research," said Yves Begin, vice dean of research and academic affairs at INRS.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances.