Abstract
This work provides a tabletop analogy to thunderstorms, which allows to produce confined and luminous plasma balls. The spectral, temporal, and spatial characterizations of these plasma balls give some indications on the formation of ball lightning. The formation of these luminous plasma balls originates from the confinement and motion of plasma cloud injected into the lower pressure channel produced along the path of the discharge.
Highlights
The origin of ball lightning (BL) formation has attracted the attention of scientists for centuries [1,2,3,4,5,6] and remains one of the most mysterious meteorological phenomena that has not obtained yet a widely accepted scientific explanation
The diameter of the heated air channel in our work is smaller than what is observed in nature, given the lower current density achieved in the laboratory; this explains the smaller diameter of the plasma ball (PB) produced in our experiments as compared to the BL’s diameter reported by eyewitnesses
Once the positive leader meets the negative leader in the air gap, the electrons at the negative leader head recombine with the positive ions at the positive leader head and produce a brighter channel at their intersection [see the green dashed ellipse in Fig. 1(b)], which is often erroneously associated with BL generation
Summary
The origin of ball lightning (BL) formation has attracted the attention of scientists for centuries [1,2,3,4,5,6] and remains one of the most mysterious meteorological phenomena that has not obtained yet a widely accepted scientific explanation. The instrumental characterizations of BL generated in nature are rare [7,8] and some of those are still questioned [9]. BL is produced in the vicinity of an active thunderstorm and its formation is generally associated with cloud-to-ground (CG) lightning strike. BL is usually observed close to the ground, with a spherical or ellipsoid shape, moving at a speed of a few meters per second. Its lifetime can range from 1 to 10 s, and the observed colors are various, ranging from white, yellow, red, purple, green, or even changes color during its lifetime
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