Studying lightning in the lab could be much easier than previously thought. You don't need to make huge sparks to get the same kinds of effects seen with lightning bolts, researchers report: a simple electrical discharge in the lab can do the trick....
Lightning bolts are thought to trigger a process called 'runaway breakdown'. As the surge of electric charge passes through the air, it ionizes atoms and accelerates electrons to speeds that approach the speed of light, leading to the emission of X-rays and gamma rays.
"It is like what happens in a particle accelerator, or in the X-ray machine at the doctor's surgery," says Joseph Dwyer, a physicist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Florida. Sparks generated in laboratories were thought to involve 'conventional' breakdown, in which the air is still ionized but the electrons don't get accelerated to such high speeds....
More at
Nature.com...
