Is ball lightning a relativistic soliton?
Ball lightning is not fully understood. It has been proposed that a stable lump of electromagnetic energy, known as a soliton, could be responsible, but such structures are usually microscopic. Now, high-power laser experiments have produced millimetre-scale relativistic solitons, indicating that they could indeed explain the phenomenon.
Nature Photonics volume 20, pages 611–612 (2026) Cite this article
Ball lightning is not fully understood. It has been proposed that a stable lump of electromagnetic energy, known as a soliton, could be responsible, but such structures are usually microscopic. Now, high-power laser experiments have produced millimetre-scale relativistic solitons, indicating that they could indeed explain the phenomenon.
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Bulanov, S. Is ball lightning a relativistic soliton?. Nat. Photon. 20, 611–612 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-026-01914-2
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