Streamers, sprites, leaders, lightning: from micro- to macroscales

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent research on streamer-like electric breakdown phenomena across micro- to macroscales, highlighting interdisciplinary approaches and recent advances in understanding their generation, structure, and products.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of recent studies from various scientific disciplines on streamer phenomena, integrating findings from a dedicated workshop and recent literature.

Findings

Advances in understanding streamer generation mechanisms

Insights into the structure of lightning and sprites

Interdisciplinary approaches to electric breakdown phenomena

Abstract

"Streamers, sprites, leaders, lightning: from micro- to macroscales" was the theme of a workshop in October 2007 in Leiden, The Netherlands; it brought researchers from plasma physics, electrical engineering and industry, geophysics and space physics, computational science and nonlinear dynamics together around the common topic of generation, structure and products of streamer-like electric breakdown. The present cluster issue collects relevant articles within this area; most of them were presented during the workshop. We here briefly discuss the research questions and very shortly review the papers in the cluster issue, and we also refer to a few recent papers in other journals.