“When a laser beam becomes intense enough, it behaves differently than usual – it collapses inward on itself,” explained study co-author Matthew Mills, a graduate of the Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers (CREOL) at University of Central Florida. “The collapse becomes so intense that electrons in the airs oxygen and nitrogen are ripped off creating plasma – basically a soup of electrons.” The resulting plasma fights the surrounding air for control, producing a pathway, or ‘light string’. This process of filamentation, as it’s called, creates “excited electrons” everywhere it passes. Those electrons are the building blocks of lightning. They can be used to create and control it. rt/news/dressed-lasers-weather-rain-548/
Posted on: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 00:33:24 +0000
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