Micro ball lightning obtained during underwater spark discharges, compared with natural ones
T.-A. Matsumoto
Summary and citation · read the original at the source
In one page
Takaaki Matsumoto, a nuclear engineer at Hokkaido University, told the 2001 IEEE pulsed-power and plasma-science conference that he could make ball lightning to order in a beaker of water. Run a direct current between thin wires of palladium, nickel, titanium, iron, cadmium, molybdenum or tungsten, immersed in ordinary water with potassium carbonate, push the voltage past about forty volts, and the current pinches itself at the electrode surface. Tiny sparks appear, gather into rings roughly a hundred micrometres across, and behave like nothing an electrode deposit should: they carry negative charge, they drift free through the solution, and Matsumoto reports finding them outside the cell, leaving rail-like tracks across nuclear emulsions. He calls the objects micro ball lightning, and the reaction he reads in their decay electro-nuclear collapse. Then he does the comparison that gives the paper its title, setting his laboratory objects beside two natural events of the year 2000 — the eruption of Mount Usu and the earthquakes at Kouzu-shima island.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 is about plasmoids and orbs, and this is one of the few papers that claims a bench recipe for making them: cheap wires, tap water, a hundred volts. Chapter 12 gets the harder half of the claim, because Matsumoto reads the objects’ decay as a nuclear event inside a dense electron-and-hydrogen cluster, which is the same architecture the lattice-confinement literature approaches from the other side.
What it claims
01Underwater spark discharge is an effective method of generating micro ball lightning. During the discharge the pinch effect works on the surfaces of thin-metal-wire electrodes and transforms atomic clusters into a special kind of cluster, which Matsumoto identifies as micro ball lightning.PPPS-2001 conference record abstract, opening sentences
Published and peer-reviewed02The cluster is covered by networks of many interconnected electrons, and Matsumoto argues that this is the condition under which new nuclear reactions can be induced inside it. The most significant of those reactions he names nuclear collapse, or electro-nuclear collapse, and reports that its explosive traces were very often found on nuclear emulsions.PPPS-2001 conference record abstract, third and fourth sentences
What to watch03Conventional elements such as carbon were regenerated, in the shapes of thin tubes and films, during the collapse events.PPPS-2001 conference record abstract, fifth sentence
What to watch04The laboratory objects and two natural ones — those observed during the volcanic eruption of Mount Usu in Hokkaido and during the earthquakes at Kouzu-shima island, both in 2000 — showed similar behaviour and generated similar explosive traces on nuclear emulsions; during the earthquakes, networks of interconnected electrons were observed on copper plates.PPPS-2001 conference record abstract, closing sentences
What to watch05The recipe is fully specified in the companion paper. Wires of pure metal are immersed in ordinary water with about 1.5 moles per litre of potassium carbonate, with roughly three millimetres of cathode and fifteen millimetres of anode in the solution so the current density is highest at the short electrode. The current-voltage curve has three regions: proportional below about forty volts, strongly fluctuating between about forty and sixty as hydrogen bursts off the cathode, and above about sixty the pinch suppresses the gas, tiny sparks cover the cathode and the current settles near a tenth of an amp.Companion paper, Experiments of Underwater Spark Discharges with Pinched Electrodes, Results section A and Figure 2
Published and peer-reviewed06With iron electrodes, ring products about ten micrometres across were caught on the cathode after twenty-seven minutes at seventy volts and 0.3 amps; within a few days every ring had decayed into a hexagonal plate. Electron-probe analysis found calcium, sodium, chlorine and cadmium in both forms alongside the host iron and the electrolyte potassium, and a ring was found lying beside a rail-like track on a nuclear emulsion outside the cell, which Matsumoto reads as the ring having passed through the glass wall.Companion paper, Results sections E and F, Figures 8 to 11
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1109/ppps.2001.960900WHAT THIS IS. A conference paper in the IEEE Conference Record — Abstracts, PPPS-2001, the 28th IEEE International Conference on Plasma Science and 13th IEEE International Pulsed Power Conference, Las Vegas, June 2001. The record carries the marker ‘Summary form only given’, so the published item is the author’s abstract rather than a full paper, and it is closed at IEEE Xplore. No text is reproduced here. SOURCES FOR THE CLAIMS. Claims one to four are read from that abstract. Claims five and six are read from the author’s companion full-length paper on the same apparatus — Takaaki Matsumoto, ‘Experiments of Underwater Spark Discharges with Pinched Electrodes’, Journal of New Energy, which is free to read at https://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MatsumotoTexperimenta.pdf — and their locators name that paper rather than the conference abstract. Matsumoto was in the Department of Nuclear Engineering at Hokkaido University, Sapporo. RELATED PAGES. Ball lightning on this site: the observational record at /library/stm-48b6e644d4, Nikitin’s electrodynamic model at /library/stm-90f3c174b1 and its test at /library/stm-dcba3701bd, and the silicon-ball energy-density measurements at /library/stm-e674ef992b.
How to cite it
T.-A. Matsumoto (2001) Micro ball lightning obtained during underwater spark discharges, compared with natural ones. doi:10.1109/ppps.2001.960900
Where it sits in the curriculum
Plasmoids, charge clusters and the orbsLattice confinement fusion