EECS Colloquium: Streamers in atmospheres of Earth and Jupiter

Abstract :
The first image of a lightning-induced transient luminous event (TLE) on Earth referred to as sprite was serendipitously captured in 1989 during a test of a low-light television camera. Sprites are large-scale mesospheric gas discharges produced by intense lightning in the underlying thunderstorms. These luminous discharges often exhibit a brief descending high-altitude diffuse glow in the shape of a pancake with diameters up to ∼80 km near ∼75 km altitude, referred to as sprite halo, and develop into fine-structured plasma filaments with diameters up to several hundred meters in the altitude range of ∼40 to ∼90 km, commonly referred to as sprite streamers. Recently possible sprites have been reported on Jupiter. Whereas the sprite streamer plasma on Earth is non-magnetized, due to Jupiter’s strong
magnetic field, streamers on Jupiter are partially magnetized. We review the phenomenology of sprite streamers on Earth and subsequently report on modeling of magnetized sprite streamers in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Specifically, we introduce the conventional plasma fluid model used to simulate sprite streamers, elaborate on efficient calculation of electron transport and rate coefficients in magnetized plasma, and discuss the optical and ultraviolet signature of these
events in the atmospheres of Earth and Jupiter.

Bio:
Reza Janalizadeh is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Electrical Engineering at Penn State University. He received his PhD degree in electrical engineering from Penn State in 2021. Reza’s research interests include atmospheric electricity (e.g., lightning) in the solar system, transient luminous events, theory of gas discharge and low temperature magnetized plasma, strong thermal emission velocity enhancement (STEVE) and picket fence optical
phenomena, and atomic and molecular physics of plasma.