A Swiss team of scientists able to control lightning flashes with powerful lasers

The old fashioned lightning rod may soon be obsolete: A powerful laser can possible control thunderbolts more effectively and protect larger areas, according to experiments  performed last fall in Switzerland.    

Traditional lightning rods date back to Benjamin Franklin who used to chase thunderstorms on horseback before his famous kite experiment in 1752. But in more recent times, scientists have looked for other ways to protect buildings and objects from damaging strikes.

The experiment carried out in Switzerland during 2021, consisted of setting up powerful lasers on top of a Swiss mountain, and shooting the lasers onto thunder clouds during heavy storms. In doing so, the scientific team claims to have been able to steer the lighting flashes.   

According to an article in The Guardian, one of the scientists behind the experiments, hopes that it will pave the way for new laser-based lightning protection systems at airports, launchpads and tall buildings:

“Metal rods are used almost everywhere to protect from lightning, but the area they can protect is limited to a few metres or tens of metres,” said Aurélien Houard, a physicist at École Polytechnique in Palaiseau.

“The hope is to extend that protection to a few hundred metres if we have enough energy in the laser,” he said to The Guardian.

 Lightning bolts are electrical discharges from the atmosphere and are extremely powerful in terms of both voltage and temperature. Lightning causes numerous deaths around the globe every year, and the material damage to buildings and infrastructure that lightning causes can be measured in billions of dollars.

The scientific team has written extensively about their experiments on Nature.com in the article Laser-guided lightning. 

To learn more, also read this article in The Guardian, which offers an in-depth summary of the experiments and what their potential real life applications may be in the future.  

Photo Credits:

B/W photos by the Swiss scientific team, and published on Nature.com.

Cover photo (above): Lightning near a rural property. Wikipedia Commons License: Own work by Brezhnev30.