A Mobile Laser for Tracking Pollution or Warding off Lightning

Teramobile is a project that aims at studying the nonlinear propagation of femtosecond-terawatt laser pulses over long distances in the atmosphere, and their applications to atmospheric research. This includes Lidar remote sensing of atmospheric pollutants as well as lightning protection and triggering by a mobile Terawatt laser system. It's eveloped jointly by two French laboratories – the Laboratory for Ionic and Molecular Spectrometry (LASIM, CNRS/University of Lyon I) and the Applied Optics Laboratory near Paris in Palaiseau (CNRS/Ecole Polytechnique/ENSTA) – and two German laboratories (The Free University of Berlin and the F. Schiller University in Jena).