Constraints from Macro-Induced Lightning

Welcome to macro_lightning, the code-base for a paper on constraining macroscopic dark matter models with observations of lightning on Earth and Jupiter. If you are looking for the paper, the peer-reviewed journal article will be linked here and the arXiv preprint here. Alternatively, the source code for the paper is included as a sub-module in the folder “docs/papers_and_presentations/paper”.

Macroscopic dark matter (macros) is a broad class of alternative candidates to particle dark matter. These candidates would transfer energy to matter primarily through elastic scattering. A sufficiently large macro passing through the atmosphere would produce a straight channel of ionized plasma. If the cross-section of the macro is \sigma_x \gtrapprox 6 \times 10^{-9} \rm{cm}^2, then under atmospheric conditions conducive to lightning (eg. a thunderstorm) the plasma channel would be sufficient to seed a lightning strike with a single leader.

This is entirely unlike ordinary bolt lightning in which a long sequence of hundreds or thousands of few-meter-long leaders are strung together. This macro-induced lightning would be extremely straight, and thus highly distinctive. Neither wind shear nor magnetohydrodynamic instabilities would markedly spoil its straightness. The only photographically documented case of a straight lightning bolt is probably not straight enough to have been macro-induced.

For any discussion or derivations, see the paper. For code documentation, see ReadTheDocs. This is the raw code.

@software{macro_lightning:zenodo,
  author       = {Nathaniel Starkman and Jagjit Sidhu and Harrison Winch and Glenn Starkman},
  title        = "Constraints from Macro-Induced Lightning",
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.3911476},
  url          = {https://zenodo.org/badge/latestdoi/275470390}
}