Historical research guide · 0436 · 2005
Expected spectrum of high-energy photons from ball lightning
Mikhail L. Shmatov
In one minute
Mikhail Shmatov is a plasma physicist at the Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute in St Petersburg who works on inertial-confinement fusion, and he treats ball lightning the same way he treats a fusion target: as a plasma object with a definite internal structure that must give itself away. His model, published two years earlier in the same journal, gives ball lightning a core of two clouds — one of electrons, one of almost completely stripped ions — oscillating against each other. A core like that has to radiate high-energy photons. This paper works out the spectrum you should expect and, more usefully, how to catch it. Shmatov proposes two methods for identifying the photon flux from a ball, and adds a third route that needs no instrument at the scene: examine the tooth enamel of someone who stood close to one. Enamel keeps a physical record of radiation dose, so a witness who later shows signs resembling radiation sickness, or who was badly burned, is carrying the measurement in their own mouth.
Connection
Chapter 9 treats plasmoids and glowing orbs as physical objects to be instrumented rather than stories to be collected, and Shmatov supplies the instrument list: if a ball has a charged oscillating core, it must emit high-energy photons, and here is the spectrum and here is how you would catch it. Read it beside Alexander Keul’s witness ledger at /library/stm-48b6e644d4, and beside Shmatov’s own follow-up at /library/stm-51c278d121, where he argues those photons may already have been recorded.
From the source
The model assumed here gives ball lightning a core consisting of clouds of electrons and almost totally ionized ions that oscillate with respect to each other, and a core of that kind emits high-energy photons whose spectrum the paper computes.Abstract; model assumption carried over from Shmatov, Journal of Plasma Physics 69 (2003)
Two methods are proposed for identifying the flux of high-energy photons emitted by ball lightning, so that an observed ball can be checked against the model rather than only described.Abstract; the two proposed identification methods
A third route needs no instrument at the scene: Shmatov proposes searching for changes in the tooth enamel of people who were close to a ball, enamel being a material that retains a physical record of radiation dose, in order to reveal the effect of such photons on human beings.Abstract; the proposed tooth-enamel diagnostic
The paper names the trigger for that diagnostic: it should be carried out if, after an observation of ball lightning, symptoms similar to those of radiation sickness arise, or if the ball caused heavy burns.Abstract, closing sentence
The underlying model treats ball lightning as a genuinely energetic object — Shmatov’s 2003 paper puts the energy of a ball at of order a million joules or greater, and predicts that such objects could be created deliberately in experiments with ordinary lightning or with powerful electrical installations.Model basis: Shmatov, ‘New model and estimation of the danger of ball lightning’, Journal of Plasma Physics 69 (2003), abstract
The prediction has a candidate detection: in 2019 Shmatov argued that the prolonged emission recorded by the Gamma-Ray Observation of Winter Thunderclouds experiment on 13 January 2012 could have come from ball lightning, by way of positron annihilation following a sharp gamma flash at the ball’s formation.Follow-up: Shmatov, Physical Review E 99, 043203 (2019), abstract; on this site at /library/stm-51c278d121
The way in
https://doi.org/10.1017/s0022377805004083How to cite it
Mikhail L. Shmatov (2005) Expected spectrum of high-energy photons from ball lightning doi:10.1017/s0022377805004083