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Curved Laser Beams Could Help Tame Lightning
Urchin writes "Laser beams just gained a new property — they can curve through space. That's what happens when ultrashort laser pulses pass through a phase pattern mask and a lens, which together shift the most intense region of the beam from the center to the right-hand side. The asymmetry in the pulse causes it to drift progressively further to the right along an arc as it travels. The laser beam is so intense that it ionizes the air it passes through to create a curved plasma channel. Those kinds of channels can be up to 100 meters long — direct them at thunderclouds and they could first trigger lightning to spark and then act as a convenient but short-lived lightning rod to guide it safely to the ground, according to some researchers."
Will they swim in a circle?
"Yeah, curving lasers, very viable".
"Lasers shoot straight, stupid!"
"So this beam is some kind of plasma or what? Laser? Are you kidding?"
Now they will all see! My sharks will be able to shoot lasers from behind a corner!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
So, this is a neat twist on an older idea.
I can't really imagine a practical use for this (a lightning rod seems like a much cheaper solution) but it's pretty nifty science.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
just gained a new property
wait, what? I don't think that's how science works...
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Those kinds of channels can be up to 100 meters long -- direct them at thunderclouds and they could first trigger lightning to spark and then act as a convenient but short-lived lightning rod to guide it safely to the ground, according to some researchers Direct them at people, and you can hit them with a laser _and_ send a couple of thousand volts through the resulting ionized air at almost the same time. Sounds like fun, doesn't it?
Igor, fire the lasers!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
... is there anyone who thinks they aren't cool?
This could finally explain the scene at 8:05 of this clip!
Two words:
Laser Saber
The Star Wars RPG explains this is the way laser sabers are supposed to work.
The laser creates an ionized path that leads right to the laser ...
Is it 2008 again?
...that this only works with lasers fired in an atmosphere? This would not work in space, right?
Set Asymmetrical Ionizing Plasma Channel creating short light pulses to stun!
The lightening rod is just for silly editors. If the idea works, it is a thundercloud discharger, grounding it. The idea being that it would stop strikes where you don't want them.
A lightening rod works after the fact and only on a very small area.
Say a thundercloud approaches, you can A: have lots of very tall spikes penetrate it so it discharges. B: create a grounding effect with some kind of plasma arc or C: put lightening rods all along the storms path hoping that the thunder will hit the rod, not something else.
So no, lightening rods are not an alternative in the same way that crash barriers are not an alternative to safe driving or safety belts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
"they can curve through space"
Errr...no...
" The laser beam is so intense that it ionizes the air..."
Do I need to point out the obvious incompatibility between the two statements?
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
"Beware of these Tesla Tanks they appear to have few vulnerabilities!"
So what the article is saying is, light bends when it goes though a lens?
OH MY GOD!!1 CALL THE COPS!!!!11
We've already seen bent lasers since 2000 ;)
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
Okay, I could understand the words but together? HELP PLZ, we aren;t all pro's, we need EXPLANATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
After reading this summary, I think I speak for everyone when I say--lolwut?
Scientists (and natural phenomena!) have been bending light through space for a long, long time.
Personally, I won't be impressed unless I see light bend through space-time. THAT would be a feat!
The problem isn't curving the plasma beam ... it's deflecting and splitting the beam at aribtrary multi-dimensional angles as it passes through the dilithium chamber. If you haven't dispersed the warp plasma evenly across the distribution matrix, you'll never be able to form or sustain a stable warp field. (Wha-hey! Foigen-glavin.)
Geezus, people ... how is "Scientists Can Now Bend Light" any more a headline than, say "Research Indicates That Water Is Wet" ???
a method to gather sufficient energy to boot up all of the cells at once, and LIVE ONCE AGAIN
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
hmmmm
lightsaber - highly curved laser
Could this also be used to initiate a set of conducting paths for tasers? That would increase their range quite a bit...
From the coverage in cited New Scientist article, it isn't clear that curved laser beams have any advantage in triggering lightning over straight beams. As it is said, it would be fun to see that curved lightning. Sounds rather like pure fun, no big scientific breakthrough, as it comes to atmosphere control.
While this is useful to redirect lightening away from areas, I would think that this might be useful to capture lightening. There is a LOT of energy in a bolt.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Direct them at tasers and they could first trigger lightning to spark and then act as a convenient but short-lived lightning rod to guide it safely to the ground, according to some researchers."
If a laser could intercept the dart before it hits you ... I can just see it now - instead of tin-foil hats, geeks will be wearing their anti-taser laser phasers.
The failure of the first particle beam/laser hybrid was due to the particles deviated from target because of their mass, falling out of the laser's beam.
So that's fixed now?
kulakovich
Normally the refractive index of a material is quoted as a constant. However, light radiation will slightly distort the electron levels of the material they are passing through, and this will have effect the refractive index. Normally this effect is very tiny. However, if you design high-power lasers, then it can become a nuisance. If you have a bright spot to your beam, then this will locally raise the refractive index. This will, in turn, cause the light to come to a line focus, which raises the intensity even more. If you do not design high-power optics to account for this, then a flat, uniform beam of light can spontaneously divide into a set of filamentary hot spots, which can smash your expensive optics.
There is another process, more usually associated with high-power ion beams. An ion beam that travels a long distance in air can twist like a garden hose squirting water. The ion beam heats up the air it is passing through, which creates a kind of pipe through the air as the hot atoms move away. This is a nuisance if you want to make the beam go in a straight line. One way of keeping an ion-beam weapon firing straight is to put a laser pre-pulse to heat a straight line through the air for the ion beam to travel down.
Didn't Aperture Science already invent this?
Doc Emmett Brown could've used something like this. Then he wouldn't have had to swindle the Libyans, and he wouldn't have gotten shot for it. Kinda makes you wonder if we can attach one of these to a capacitor that can hold 1.21 JigaWatts (or several times that for several lighting strikes).
So, you fire your laser up into the thundercloud, and it causes the lightning strike to follow it back, directing several million amps into... your laser. Good luck with that then.
Also "In Soviet Russia, laser looks into eye! (of storm)"
How fast can it cook 2000 pounds of Jiffy-pop?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Fox: I want you to curve the laser
Wesley: How am I supposed to do that?
Sloan: [walking in] It's not a question of how. It's a question of what. If no one told you that lasers flew straight, and I gave you a pulse laser and told you to hit the target, what would you do? Let your instincts guide you.
http://www.freewebs.com/weirderandweirder/weirdTitor.bmp
An actual picture of the beam, courtesy of John Titor.
I, too, can produce a curved stream of particles. I use it to write my name in the snow.
Now that we can forcefully predict (or force) the location of where lightning will land, that means we can build containers to capture all that energy instead of letting it go to waste!!!
This is not a "thundercloud discharger" unless your thundercloud is within 100 meters of the ground. They aren't, and most of those who are get called "tornadoes", but we can use blades of curved ionized air to cover a building's roof. So it could be used as a local lightning guide. And if it glows, it can also be used as decoration.
Christodoulides's team's work could be combined with his to help aim the laser pulses and plasma channels at specific targets, such as clouds, although he points out that the laser pulses can also be guided using mirrors. "But it would be fun to see curved lightning discharges," he says.
This article is cool up until the lightning bit. As the quote from TFA shows, there's absolutely no connection between the curved lasers and the technique for triggering lighting. As far as generating an ion channel goes, the curved laser does nothing a straight laser can't. The only connection between the otherwise completely disconnected bits of research is that the lightning guy commented on the curved laser stuff and essentially said that while using mirrors is more feasible in his project, using curved lasers would look cool.
Everytime someone comes up with an interesting discovery in science, people invariably ask what it's good for. Ditto for math. The problem is that a lot (most?) research is done for its own sake, to discover new things, rather than having any particular application in mind. History has shown that applications tend to come later, and in the places you least expect it, so it pays to just be curious. People thought group theory was just weird abstract shit until someone figured out how to use it in applied chemistry.
It's said when the need to immediately justify every new discovery has gotten to the point where an article needs to include a completely contrived and ridiculous application just to placate people.
I never knew that they created their own channels to travel through, though I guess it makes sense. I seem to recall scientists of yore once thinking that light traveled along its own self-generated aether. I guess plasma channels are kind of like that, so it would appear we've come full circle (Light creates its own medium to travel through, no it doesn't, it kind of does.)
Does anyone know if all light behaves this way or just lasers (Or lasers of a certain intensity)? Better yet, a resource that is (at least somewhat) plain English where I could get a primer on light behavior? I really know nothing about this and would love to learn more.
They use to have an electron beam weapon at the High Energy Weapons Facility in White Sands, NM.
Not sure if it is still in service. It was able to create an ionized pathway up to approx. 80,000ft!
Humans have a curved magic wang?
C|N>K
"There it is! It's listing lazily to the left. Go left, left! Boy, this laser knows some maneuvers."
DISCLAIMER: I am very rarely serious. If the above comment seems asinine makes no sense, it is most likely a bad joke.
Of course the laser beam don't need to curve to tame lightning. Presumably a mirror cheap enough to sacrific to a lightning strike could be moved to the approprate place, right? Even the researcher admits this is...
And it might go w/o mentioning that the mythbuster in all of us /.-ers wants to see a curved lightning discharge destroy a $1M laser ;^)
So now they've invented lasers that bend like the ones in so many animes. :)
Well, not really, but it was fun to imagine.
The suggestions that straight beams could do the same are only partly right, and indicate who didn't read TFA. The concentration of the most intense part of the beam due to the curving mask and lens makes it more efficient than unaltered straight beams in creating ionized channels for a given beam strength. Something that did the same concentrating for straight beams would produce the same effect, but the fact remains that the curving mechanism would produce it as stated.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The next Wanted sequel would have curved lasers instead of bullets.
interesting, very. but informative ?
Sharks with bent friggin laser beams on their head!
Now that we can have a much more accurate destination for lightning strikes we could prevent disasters such as forest fires caused by lightning, but what I am more interested in seeing is what we will come up with to just simply convert the lightning into raw power that could possibly be fairly inexpensive during different times of the year.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but wouldn't getting hit by lightning be the sort of thing that would damage the laser?
Do not look at lightning with remaining laser.
No! No! NO!
That is NOT what i meant when i said i wanted "Orbiting Laser Platforms!!!" The PLATFORMS should be in orbit! Not the LASERS!
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I used to work on this technology. The justification for it is really simple. If you could prevent just one lightning induced internet or power outage the amount of money saved would more than pay for all the research to date.
Under conditions When it works these systems are more effective than lightning rods. But to make these things ubiquitously functional and dependable is not a simple matter.
The airy beam decribed here I believe is just a variation of the old axiconic focus concept. With an axicon the beam only "looks like" it is bending. But the light does not bend per se. What is happeing is that one creates a fresnel lens and adjusts each lens segment to focus at a different foci. If you do this densly enhough the foci merge into a line. the light passing through one foci immediately diverges and does not pass through the next focii. That next focii is formed by diffenent rays. But to the viewer it looks like a continuous filament.
This is distict from soliton filmamentation. In this kind of filmentation the light realy does self-induce a light guide that allows an extended filemanet like focus. It's not unreasonable to imagine that a clever person could design an assymetric filament that would propagate it's light guide into an arc.
The description of the system uses language draw from both genre's of filament production, so it's not really clear which they are doing. This is understandable since due to the destructive nature of the filaments it's really really hard to insert monitoring equipment into the beam to actually determine which way the light is propagating. In many cases it's likely a little bit of both. some self containment fed by some axiconic focusing to replenish the beam as it loses energy.
In any cast the end result is a conduction channel.
Like lightning rods sometimes the purpose of the conduction channel is not to seed a lighting path but rather to cause conduction to drain the charge separation that is creating the conditions for lighting. indeed originally lightning rods were placed in large arrays to deplete the stored energy and prevent lightining rather than be sacrificial guides that preferentially attract lightning.
While either technique is good at preventing lightings lethal effects of causing fires. with electronics it is better to just never have lightining bolt at all, as our electronic systems fon't do well when the ground plane suddenly surges to a million volts.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
They could have vaporized the Rebel Moon by shooting around the planet. Instead, they wasted time going around the planet, giving the Rebels time to counter attack.
Of course, I'm not sure why they just didn't blast the planet, and let the resulting debris field take out the moon.
First thought in my mind - "Cool, now we can Call Lighting to Smite Thine Enemies!" http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Call_Lightning
Which is the "right" side of the laser? For that matter, which is the "WRONG" side!?!?
Why is there even a need to reduce/eliminate lightning in the first place? from what I can find, there's an average of 90 lightning related deaths per year in the USA, which is not very much at all. There seems to be no reasonable explanation on why lightning needs to be stopped. Seems the resources could be better spent preventing other things.
01110000 01010111 01101110 00110011 01100100
and tell Doc Brown they don't need to wait for the clock tower.
I mean, really, curved light, plasma, lenses, blocks other energy possibly other energy weapons. It's a jedi's weapon .....
Upgrade your light sabres! Trade them in for the new LIGHT SCIMITAR!!!!!
I believe there is a fundamental flaw with attempting to utilize the laser (straight or curved) in conjunction with (either straight or curved) sharks. Though there has been some research of benefits to utilize them in an asymmetric configuration(curved shark:straight laser, straight shark:curved laser), there is indication that the research was flawed due to the researchers themselves being curved (or maybe it was bent).
In any case, the utilization of lasers, with aquatic organisms, has been shown to be most effective, when used with sea bass, and in particular ill-tempered sea bass.