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Lichtenberg figures are electrical discharges with a feather-like branching pattern, discovered by German physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. They are considered a form of fractal and have practical applications in medicine and electronics. The difference between positive and negative charges creates different patterns, and photocopying technology relies on this. Lichtenberg used resin or glass insulators coated with powdered conductors to generate the figure, but now acrylic plastic blocks and ionized gases are used.
A Lichtenberg figure is a form of electrical discharge that has a feather-like branching pattern. It is named after a 16th-century German physicist, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, who is credited with discovering the pattern. The output generated in a Lichtenberg figure is considered a form of fractal, which are patterns in nature that repeat on ever smaller and smaller scales, demonstrating a property known as self-similarity.
The contemporary science of plasma physics is based on fundamental principles involved in the creation of branching electric discharges such as the Lichtenberg figure. The fractals, or electrical trees of energy that are created when a Lichtenberg figure is formed, are due to the physical properties of dielectrics. Dielectric is the study of electrical breakdown when high voltage currents are passed through an insulator or substance capable of maintaining an electric field with little loss of power.
Even xerography, or the process used by photocopying machines, is based on the principles of electrostatic discharge revealed for the first time in the figure of Lichtenberg. One of the unique aspects of Georg Lichtenberg’s work with these figures was that he discovered that positive and negative charges show very different kinds of patterns. A positively charged figure tends to be heavily branched and multilayered, while a negatively charged figure more closely resembles the pattern of expanding circular waves one sees when dropping a stone into a pond. Photocopying technology relies on the difference in positive and negative charges to transmit images to paper.
Originally Georg Lichtenberg used means of generating a figure, such as resin or glass insulators, coated with a thin layer of powdered conductors of sulfur or lead tetroxide. These early displays are known as Lichtenberg Dust Figures. Surface charges appeared in the powder coating not unlike what is seen when iron filings arrange themselves in a pattern in the presence of a magnetic field. Lichtenberg’s figure more closely resembled a pattern of natural lightning with a more uniform discharge of energy from a circular center that branched outward.
As research into the properties of the Lichtenberg figure continued into the 19th and 20th centuries, media such as photographic film and ionized gases were later used to visualize branching electrical discharges. A current method of generating a Lichtenberg figure is to use acrylic plastic blocks as insulators through which a linear accelerator passes a very high voltage, in the 19 kilowatt range. This process generates electron beams up to 20 million electron volts (MeV), which are capable of penetrating up to approximately 150 inches (5 cm) into the acrylic base before being stopped. By rotating the acrylic block or loading multiple regions, an elaborate three-dimensional figure can be created. Research on Lichtenberg’s figure may have many practical applications in medicine, electronics, and more, and is also a side effect of nuclear fusion research at Sandia National Laboratory’s Z Facility, New Mexico, USA.
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