laser arrester

Lightning strikes kill some 24,000 people every year in the world, and cause forest fires, power outages and damage to various infrastructures.

To this day, the best way to protect yourself from lightning is still to use lightning rods, which have changed very little since Benjamin Franklin invented the first one in 1752.

It seems, therefore, that it is time to modernize them much more.

And that is what scientists are working on, who have shown that it is possible to use a laser beam to guide lightning towards the top of a conventional lightning rod.

For practical purposes, it is like extending the effective working height of a conventional lightning rod by complementing it with an upper section that is a laser beam.

In a spectacular experiment, the team led by Jean-Pierre Wolf, a professor at the University of Geneva (UNIGE) in Switzerland, projected a laser beam into the sky during a storm and managed to “catch” a bolt of lightning and guide it tens of meters down, until making it come into contact with the tip of a conventional lightning rod, which did the rest of the work.

(Photo: Xavier Ravinet / UNIGE)

Wolf and his colleagues discuss the technical details of their laser arrester system in the academic journal Nature Photonics, under the title “Laser-guided lightning.” (Font: NCYT by Amazings)