Chinese Researchers Report Bottling a Ball-Lightning Lookalike for 100 Nanoseconds

SHANGHAI, CHINA — Ball lightning, the luminous sphere said for centuries to drift through the atmosphere, has long defied explanation. According to a report in The Debrief, researchers at the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics now say they have produced a laboratory phenomenon that resembles it.

The work, published in Nature Photonics under the title "Ball-lightning-like relativistic terahertz solitons," describes a glowing ball of electromagnetic energy. The team used extremely powerful terahertz radiation, which sits on the spectrum between microwaves and infrared light, to create what the article calls a spherical soliton, a quasiparticle that travels as a non-dissipative wave.

By the report's account, the sphere measured only a few meters across and remained detectable for roughly 100 nanoseconds. That is brief by human reckoning, but the article describes it as unusually long for such a structure under the extreme conditions of the experiment.

The researchers further report that the sphere gave off light from the ultraviolet through the visible and into the infrared, and that its spectral signatures indicated ionization. Its expansion, they say, was consistent with current theoretical models, and its sustained glow suggested that it confined its energy rather than dispersing it at once.

The article is careful to note that the findings do not conclusively explain how natural ball lightning forms. The researchers suggest the work may eventually inform high-energy photon storage and technologies that harness powerful radiation. For now, the sphere has been made to appear on demand, if only for a moment.