An international scientific team announced that managed for the first time to use a laser to redirect a beamon a Swiss mountain.
Atmospheric lightning strikes the earth’s ground between 40 and 120 times per second. Every year they kill more than 4,000 people. and cause economic losses worth billions of dollars.
The main protection up to now has been the lightning rod, a simple metal bar pointed and invented by the American scientist Benjamin Franklin in 1749.
The team, made up of experts from six different institutions, has been working on an alternative for years.
His proposal, published in the magazine Nature Photonicsis to incessantly launch an impulse in the form of a laser to “guide” the beam, instead of simply attracting it, as the metal bar does.
“We wanted to offer the first demonstration that a laser can influence the raysand that the easiest thing is to guide them”, he explained to the AFP Aurélien Houard, a physicist at the Applied Optics Laboratory of the Polytechnic School of Paris.
Houard is the main author of a project that was developed for two decades together with Jean-Pierre Wolf, from the Applied Physics group at the University of Geneva, and with other collaborators.
Lightning is a discharge of static electricity accumulated between two clouds during a storm, or between those clouds and the Earth, while the laser is an induced emission of radiation to generate a halo of light.
By emitting the laser into the sky, Houard and Wolf’s team manage to create a plasma (air charged with ions and electrons) that is partially conductive and that “thus becomes a preferential path for the beam,” Houard explains.
Scientists attempted an experimental test in 2004 in New Mexicowhich failed due to errors in the laser, and because it was difficult to calculate where the beam was going to fall.
At the top of the Santis mountain, at an altitude of 2,500 meters (northeast of Switzerland), scientists found the solution.
in that place there is a 124 meter high telecommunication tower It receives around a hundred rays each year.
The scientists built a powerful laser for two years inside a telescope, which due to its characteristics can concentrate the intensity of the light beam in a few centimeters.
In the summer of 2021 they managed to attract and guide lightning over 50 meters, a successful experiment that could be repeated three times.
The long-term goal would be to spark and drive that electrical spark., of great power, and thus protect strategic installations, such as airports. (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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