Ball Lightning Discharge Fed by an Atmospheric Maser

The present paper describes the interaction of the maser with the soliton, finally deriving the fundamental ball lightning (BL) equation for the linear heat diffusion case. This equation is a rough first approximation based on many drastic simplifications. It assumes stationarity and neglects the field emission of carriers caused by the maser. Our calculations prove for the first time that the instantaneous feedback present in the atmospheric maser allows the discharge to remain stable in the so far always unstable, much colder, discharge branch at atmospheric pressure, even without field emission processes. In fact, according to the basic Maser-caviton theory, natural BL is too cold for electrons to be present and allow it to exist in the stationary state, so it continually extinguishes and is reignited by very fast maser feedback. These are in fact maser spiking oscillations. The life of the dynamically stabilized BL soliton consists therefore from a continual succession of deaths and rebirths. INTRODUCTION When lightning strikes on flat terrain, a strong homogeneous electric field pulse is present simultaneously in a large volume of moist air, of the order of cubic miles. As shown earlier [Handel 1988, 1989], this pulse can lead to homogeneous population inversion in the rotational energy levels of the H2O molecule. Close to mountain tops, the electric field and the ensuing population inversion is limited to a coneshaped volume, so this pulse does not lead to maser action without cavity walls. On flat terrain this field pulse will sometimes lead to maser action for a period of the order of seconds, due to the low rate of forbidden transitions between closely spaced pairs of rotational energy levels of the water molecule. The condition for this maser action to take place is that the gain G exceeds the loss L in the number of photons per time unit