On April 16, the team from the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (hereinafter referred to as "SIOM") under the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that for the first time in the world, they have artificially created a "spherical lightning-like" phenomenon highly similar to natural ball lightning, thereby solving this century-old natural mystery. The relevant findings were published in the international journal Nature Photonics.

Ball lightning, commonly known as "rolling thunder," is one of the most mysterious electromagnetic phenomena in nature. For a long time, numerous theories have existed, but there has always been a lack of repeatable and precisely verifiable experimental support. This time, the team led by Song Liwei, Tian Ye, and Li Ruxin at SIOM, leveraging the Shanghai Superintense Ultrafast Laser Facility (the "Xihe" laser facility), successfully excited and captured a spherical luminous body, confirming its essence as an electromagnetic soliton.

The research team has long been deeply engaged in the field of high-power laser-driven terahertz sources. They independently built a spatiotemporally resolved diagnostic system, enabling precise observation of the entire soliton process. In the laboratory, high-speed cameras captured: a bright white sphere enveloped by a bluish plasma shell, slowly expanding like a "cocoon of light" before finally dissipating. This electromagnetic soliton has a diameter of about one hundred micrometers and a lifetime of about one hundred nanoseconds, with a spectrum covering the ultraviolet to infrared broadband. Through physical scaling transformations, it can correspond to natural ball lightning with a diameter of several tens of centimeters and a duration of several seconds.