Manipulating Lighting With Lasers
Lighting fascinates us with how untamable they are. But that may now change. A new laser system can control lighting during a simulated storm. And if it works during a real one we will become the Lords of Lightning. Eat your heart out Thor.
Image by WikimediaImages from Pixabay
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To some, it will sound like science fiction. But real scientists are working on it. A system capable of changing the path of lighting using laser beams. But would such a system even be useful? Well, a very practical motivation is lying behind the research as it taking place in Australia and it’s precisely in Australia where lighting is the cause of many fires. And not only there. More and more this is also happening in the United States and other places around the world. If the system of deflecting lighting works it could help save the lives of many people and animals who die in fires.
According to the research lead Vladlen Shvedov from the Australian National University you can imagine how this or a similar technology discharges lighting in the future making the Earth safer by reducing the number of catastrophic fires.
To simplify – lighting is an intense electric current which usually connects a positively charged spot near the surface and a negatively charged point in the clouds. One of the key things in the creation of lighting is the activity of the frozen water drops. The system mimics the process during which lighting is created and at the same time creates a new path of it. It is designed in a way to allow a low-energy laser to catch and move light-absorbing particles in the atmosphere.
The researchers tested their unique approach to lighting using micro-particles of graphene that were carrying electrical charge. The experiment simulated atmospheric conditions during a storm. The results show that the system allows to star, catch, and guide electrical discharges in the atmosphere. For the moment it wasn’t tested on real natural lighting but it should work as well.
A big benefit is that the technology works at a large distance and only need a low-energy laser. This makes the system practical and cheap. The intensity of the laser used in about a thousand times weaker compared to previous similar experiments. The system sort of works as a tractor beam you may know from sci-fi but only for lighting.
The best thing is that the system for manipulating electrical discharges could be also used in other places than just in storms. It could also find its use in industrial use or medicine – for example, to remove cancer tissue without invasive surgery as the creators of the technology are already capable of guiding the electric discharge into an area just a tenth the width of a human hair.
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