Cosmology seminar: Straight Lightning as a Signature of Macroscopic Dark Matter

Macroscopic dark matter (macros) is a broad class of alternative candidates to particle dark matter. A sufficiently large macro would ionize a long and straight plasma channel and, under conducive atmospheric conditions,  produce highly distinctive straight lightning. In my talk I will discuss the generation of macro-induced lightning, the region of parameter space that can be probed with a monitoring program, and a very recent observation of straight lightning — the first known candidate realization of  this prediction.