On this July day, the weather is not kind to Jean-Pierre Wolf.
The sun laughs almost mockingly from the azure blue sky, the wind has withered to a breeze - nothing far and wide of what the Geneva physics professor longs for.
He needed dark clouds up here on the Säntis, thunder, lightning and rambazamba.
But for weeks the thunderstorms have been avoiding the fabulous mountain, which protrudes from eastern Switzerland at 2502 meters.
Nowhere in Switzerland is it wetter, nowhere does lightning strike more often - it usually pops around 400 times a year.
But not in these weeks: zero thunderstorms, zero lightning, it is bewitched.
Heavy thunderstorms are falling all over Europe, just not on the mountain of lightning.
Andreas Frey
Freelance writer in the science of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Now even Jean-Pierre Wolf is not one who is happy about extreme weather, as they wash away entire districts in West Germany at the same time.
But he's up here to catch lightning.
He wants to shoot thunderclouds with a laser cannon in order to divert the lightning in a controlled manner.
A good 270 years after Benjamin Franklin, he invented a new lightning rod.
"Laser Lightning Rod" is the name of the EU-funded project.
Wolf's mission is nothing less than taming the sky, manipulating the weather with the aim of protecting airports, wind farms or sporting events.
Previous attempts failed
Because of the special tendency towards thunderstorms on the Säntis, Jean-Pierre Wolf chose this mountain for his unique experiment, on which lightning research has been carried out for many years. He himself also has a long relationship with the subject and its pitfalls. 16 years ago he wanted to divert lightning strikes to the ground, back then in the American state of New Mexico, with a different, not yet so well developed laser technology. But then there were hardly any thunderstorms and the attempt failed, the laser failed. The big laser experiment on the Säntis should also have started earlier, but then came the corona pandemic.
Finally, in the spring, the weather was bad for so long that the helicopters could not fly to bring the heavy equipment up the mountain. Thunderstorm after thunderstorm went through during the installation of the laboratory in June, but the laser was not yet ready to fire. It has been hot since the beginning of July, but the sky is grazing. “It hasn't worked out yet,” is Wolf's brief summary that afternoon.
So now it's time to wait - once again.
The Lord of the Lightning is now standing on the terrace, the sun slamming into his face, the abyss begins behind him.
But Jean-Pierre Wolf is not someone who lets his mood be spoiled.
With a T-shirt and sunglasses you could mistake the 61-year-old Frenchman for a tourist.
With a springy step he moves towards a white container from which the laser beam will fire into the sky.
Clouds under constant fire
In the container, the researchers have positioned various mirrors that are supposed to direct the laser beam towards the sky. The actual laser laboratory is located in the science station next to it, which is used by the Swiss broadcaster Swisscom and where the experiment will begin. The laser was developed by Clemens Herkommer from TRUMPF in Ditzingen near Stuttgart, Wolf's project partner. The 31-year-old engineer spent four years building a laser that would meet the requirements of this experiment.
The result is a small monster, eight meters long, one and a half meters high, just as wide and weighing ten tons, a so-called ultra-short pulse laser. In order for air to be conductive, it has to be ionized. This requires a terawatt class laser. The very high light intensity heats the air and releases the electrons of the oxygen and nitrogen molecules - this creates a channel of ionized gas, conductive like in a metal stick.