Spontaneous Charge aggregation and Polarization Model for Electric Discharges in Clouds

TL;DR

This paper presents a simplified, field-free model of cloud charge aggregation showing how neutral droplets can form charged clouds with increasing electric dipole moments and net charge, potentially explaining lightning phenomena.

Contribution

The model demonstrates how neutral charged droplets can spontaneously form charged clouds with increasing charge and dipole moment without external fields, highlighting a new mechanism for lightning formation.

Findings

Net cloud charge increases with the square root of mass.

Electric dipole moment grows quasi-linearly and superlinearly with cloud size.

Self-created electric fields can arise from random aggregation processes.

Abstract

In present models cloud based lightning forms as a consequence of the earth's gravitational and/or electromagnetic fields. Our simplified field-free model probes the random aggregation of a neutral ensemble consisting of a random distribution of equal numbers of equally charged positive and negative "frozen droplets", given a bivariate sticking probability. Over a wide range of parameters, one maximal cluster (called "cloud") is formed, with time-increasing mass, net charge and electric dipole moment, where all relations follow a simple argument, and the only parameter is the fractal dimension of the cloud: In this overall neutral system we find that the net charge of the cloud increases with the square root of the cloud's mass, while the electric dipole moment increases quasi-linearly and even superlinearly. Thus an internal electric field can be self-created by a random process, with a field-strength that increases with time and cloud size, using just a two-dimensional random walk. Potential implications of this toy model on "real life" clouds are discussed, i.e., the electric dipole moment based possibility of having intra-cloud lightning discharges, and the net electric charge based possibility of having extra-cloud lightning discharges, all in the absence of gravitational or other external fields or forces. Possible implications are discussed for both water and dust based clouds, atmospheric and extraterrestrial. Potential applications to biology are also discussed.