High-Energy Atmospheric Physics: Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes and Related Phenomena
By Joseph R. Dwyer, David M. Smith, S. Cummer. Space Science Reviews, 2012
319 citations recorded by the source corpus.
It is now well established that both thunderclouds and lightning routinely emit x-rays and gamma-rays. These emissions appear over wide timescales, ranging from sub-microsecond bursts of x-rays associated with lightning leaders, to sub-millisecond bursts of gamma-rays seen in space called terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, to minute long glows from thunderclouds seen on the ground and in or near the cloud by aircraft and balloons. In particular, terrestrial gamma-ray flashes (TGFs), which are thought to be emitted by thunderclouds, are so bright that they sometimes saturate detectors on spacecraft hundreds of kilometers away. These TGFs also generate energetic secondary electrons and positrons that are detected by spacecraft in the inner magnetosphere. It is generally believed that these x-ray and gamma-ray emissions are generated, via bremsstrahlung, by energetic runaway electrons that are accelerated by electric fields in the atmosphere. In this paper, we review this newly emerging field of High-Energy Atmospheric Physics, including the production of runaway electrons, the production and propagation of energetic radiation, and the effects of both on atmospheric electrodynamics.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d8c134915062b5dd505d7e7503791fd90cf13f78
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Martin A. Uman
- S. Nijdam
- Joseph R. Dwyer
- Jannis Teunissen
- Ute Ebert
- David M. Smith
- S. Cummer
- V. Pasko
In Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Citations in the corpus
- The physics of lightning (2014, background): “Terrestrial Gamma-Ray Flashes (TGFs), discussed in detail in Sections 5.3.4 and 5.4.8, are bursts of X-ray and gamma rays usually of less than 1 ms total duration with energies of individual photons reaching tens of MeV.”
- The physics of streamer discharge phenomena (2020, background): “The existence of runaway electrons and consecutive X-rays and γ-rays is now well established in thunderstorm physics [172], and they are a topic of much current research in the geosciences.”