Natural Particle Accelerators

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Welcome back.


Today I am going to tell you something about natural particle accelerators, how does they work and what are their uses?


We all had heard about the particle accelerators or even read about them in our science books, such as Cyclotron and more recently all of us had heard about the LHC through various sources of media, whether it is a print media or through television. These all particle accelerators are made by man.


The question arises, What is a particle accelerator? 


A particle accelerator is a device that uses electric fields to propel charged particles to high speeds and to contain them in well-defined beams. An ordinary CRT television set is a simple form of accelerator.


Had you ever heard or even think about the particle accelerators existing in nature? 


Yes it is true, that nature has also its own particle accelerators and today in this topic I am going to tell you about the same natural particle accelerator


The idea of natural particle accelerators existing just kilometres above our heads first came in 1925, when the UK physicist and Nobel laureate Charles Wilson investigated the effects of a thundercloud's electric field. Wilson claimed that the electric field would cause an electrical breakdown of the Earth's atmosphere above the cloud, leading to transient phenomena such as sprites.

These sprites, physicists suggested, would do more than just light up the sky. As highly energetic particles or "cosmic rays" from space bombard our atmosphere, they strip air molecules of their outer electrons. In the presence of a sprite's electric field, these electrons could be forced upward in a narrow beam from the troposphere to near-Earth space. Moreover, the changing electron current would, via Maxwell's equations, produce electromagnetic waves in the radio-frequency range.

In 1998 Füllekrug's colleague Robert Roussel-Dupré of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, US, used a supercomputer to simulate these radio waves. The simulations predicted they would come in pulses with a fairly flat spectrum – contrary to the electromagnetic spectrum of the lightning itself, which increases at lower frequencies.

The first evidence that thunderstorms can function as huge natural particle accelerators has been collected by an international team of researchers.

In a presentation at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in Glasgow last week, Martin Füllekrug of Bath University described how the team detected radio waves coinciding with the appearance of "sprites" – glowing orbs that occasionally flicker into existence above thunderstorms. The radio waves suggest the sprites can accelerate nearby electrons, creating a beam with the same power as a small nuclear power plant.

"The discovery of the particle accelerator allows us to apply the knowledge gained in particle physics to the real world, and put the expected consequences to experimental testing." 

Indeed, we might be hearing a lot more about natural particle accelerators in the near future. The IBUKI satellite from Japan could soon be looking at the movement of charged particles in the atmosphere. In the next few years several missions – including CHIBIS from Russia and TARANIS from France – should provide more data about these accelerators.

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