On the 16th, the team of the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, announced that it was the first time in the world to artificially create "ball like lightning" that is highly similar to nature, and solve the mystery of nature for a century. The relevant results were published in the international journal Nature Photonics. Ball lightning, commonly known as "rolling landmines", is one of the most mysterious electromagnetic phenomena in nature. For a long time, there have been numerous related theories, but there has always been a lack of experimental support that can be repeated and accurately verified. The research team, relying on the Shanghai Super Ultra Short Laser Experimental Device ("Xihe" Laser Device), successfully excited and captured a spherical luminous body that is highly similar in shape, state, and emission characteristics to natural spherical lightning, confirming that the essence of spherical lightning is an "electromagnetic soliton". The team has been deeply involved in the field of strong laser driven terahertz sources for a long time, and has independently built a spatiotemporal resolution diagnostic system to achieve accurate observation of the entire process of electromagnetic solitons. In the laboratory, a high-speed camera captured a bright white sphere wrapped in a dark blue plasma shell, slowly expanding and eventually dissipating like a "cocoon of light". The electromagnetic soliton has a diameter of about 100 microns and a lifetime of up to 100 nanoseconds. Its spectrum covers a wide range of ultraviolet to infrared wavelengths. After physical scaling transformation, it can correspond to spherical lightning with a diameter of tens of centimeters and a duration of several seconds in nature. The research team uses femtosecond strong laser to drive micro metal wires, generating terahertz surface waves that converge at the nanotip to obtain a relativistic level intensity near-field, providing a high-quality driving source for the generation of sub millimeter scale electromagnetic solitons; At the same time, a supersonic argon gas jet is injected into the near-field region of the needle tip, and under the action of a strong field, the gas is rapidly ionized into plasma. The delicate balance between light wave radiation pressure and plasma thermal pressure traps terahertz waves, ultimately generating stable spherical lightning structures. This achievement not only reveals the mysteries of nature, but also reveals the mechanism of extreme electromagnetic energy confinement, which is expected to provide new ideas for cutting-edge fields such as fusion energy, high energy density physics, and energy storage. (New Society)