Possible detection of high-energy photons from ball lightning
M. L. Shmatov
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In one page
On 13 January 2012 a ground-based gamma-ray array on the Sea of Japan coast recorded something striking during a winter thunderstorm: a sharp flash lasting under a third of a second, coincident with a discharge inside the cloud, followed by about a minute of decaying gamma rays that carried a clear electron-positron annihilation line near 511 keV. Mikhail Shmatov argues that the minute-long tail could have been emitted by ball lightning. His model gives ball lightning a core of two interpenetrating clouds — electrons, and almost totally ionised ions — oscillating against each other, energetic enough to produce high-energy photons. In that picture the sharp flash that accompanies the formation of the ball makes beta-plus-active isotopes in the air, and photons from the ball itself make electron-positron pairs; the positrons then annihilate, and their annihilation radiation is what the detectors went on recording after the stroke was over. It turns a famous thundercloud measurement into a candidate fingerprint for a luminous sphere.
Why it matters hereChapter 9 treats the glowing sphere as a physical object to be instrumented rather than a story to be collected, and this paper is the sharpest version of that programme: a real gamma-ray record, already published, read as the signature of a ball lightning core. It also names what would settle it — an annihilation line and a decaying tail of tens of seconds, recorded alongside a sighting. Read it with Alexander Keul’s ledger of trained-observer cases at /library/stm-48b6e644d4 and Anatoly Nikitin’s electrodynamic model of the core at /library/stm-90f3c174b1.
What it claims
01Shmatov argues that the photons of the prolonged emission recorded by the Gamma-Ray Observation of Winter Thunderclouds experiment on 13 January 2012 could have been emitted by ball lightning.Abstract, first clause
What to watch02The proposed mechanism is annihilation: the positrons arose mainly from the production of beta-plus-active isotopes by the sharp gamma-ray flash that accompanies the formation of ball lightning, and from the production of electron-positron pairs by photons coming from the ball lightning itself.Abstract, first sentence, second half
What to watch03The model of ball lightning used here assumes a core consisting of clouds of electrons and almost totally ionized ions which oscillate with respect to each other — the same core the author had used earlier to predict a high-energy photon flux from ball lightning.Abstract, final sentence; the earlier statement is at /library/stm-520f1cd857
What to watch04The observation being reinterpreted is a real and published one: an intense burst of gamma rays detected on 13 January 2012 that began with a sharp flash of under 300 milliseconds coincident with an intracloud discharge, followed by a decaying emission lasting about 60 seconds whose spectrum reached about 10 MeV and contained a line at 508 keV, plus or minus 3 statistical and 5 systematic, identified with electron-positron annihilation and carrying 520 plus or minus 50 photons, about 10 per cent of the 5340 plus or minus 190 signal photons detected over 0.1 to 10 MeV.The observation this paper reinterprets: Umemoto et al., Phys. Rev. E 93, 021201(R) (2016), abstract
Published and peer-reviewed05The proposal is testable in the form it is stated: if ball lightning carries an energetic core of this kind, then a sighting recorded together with an annihilation line and a decaying gamma-ray tail of tens of seconds after the stroke is the measurement that would assign the emission to the sphere rather than to the thundercloud alone.Abstract, read as a whole with the observation paper
What to watch
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.99.043203Physical Review E 99, issue 4, article 043203 (2019). RIGHTS AND TEXT. The article is closed access under the APS default licence, no open version is recorded by Unpaywall or OpenAlex, and the publisher’s pages decline automated retrieval, so the paper was not read for this page. The author’s own abstract, as indexed for this DOI by OpenAlex from the publisher’s record, was read on 2026-09-08 and is the source of every claim located to ’Abstract’. The observation the paper reinterprets is Umemoto and colleagues, ’On-ground detection of an electron-positron annihilation line from thunderclouds’, Physical Review E 93, 021201(R) (2016); that paper is green open access and its abstract, which supplies the numbers in the fourth claim, was read from the same index on the same day. The author’s earlier statement of the same ball lightning model is carried on this site at /library/stm-520f1cd857. No reproduced text appears on this page.
How to cite it
M. L. Shmatov (2019) Possible detection of high-energy photons from ball lightning. doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.99.043203
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