Constraining Dark Matter Models with 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, click here. For a (hopefully) complete list of all papers and presentations, see Papers and Presentations
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 \(\sigma_x \gtrapprox 6\times10^{-9} \rm{cm}^2\), 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 the mathematical derivation of these properties, as well as the phase-space constraints on macro models from non-observation of straight lightning on Earth and Jupiter, see the paper. This is documentation for the code used in the paper.
All code and data is available on a public repository on GitHub, so if you have any trouble, open an issue there.
Documentation¶
Modules¶
Though the code base is quite light it has been split into its natural components: utility functions, plotting functions, and the physics functions.
Examples¶
How to contribute¶
We welcome contributions from anyone via pull requests on GitHub. If you don’t feel comfortable modifying or adding functionality, we also welcome feature requests and bug reports as GitHub issues.
The development process follows that of the astropy-package-template from Astropy’s release procedure.
Attribution¶
Copyright 2020 - Nathaniel Starkman, Jagjit Sidhu, Harrison Winch, Glenn Starkan, and contributors.
macro_lightning is free software made available under the BSD-3 License. For details see the LICENSE file.
If you make use of this code, please consider citing the Zenodo DOI as a software citation:
@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}
}