Ambient Field Enhancement Hypothesis (AFEH): An Agnostic Evaluation of Candidate Sources for the Electric Field Required by TACD

Abstract

This note introduces the Ambient Field Enhancement Hypothesis (AFEH), a companion evaluation that addresses one item the Topography-Anchored Corona Discharge (TACD) model leaves open by design: TACD requires an ambient electric field above a site-dependent threshold to drive corona onset at a grounded point, but treats the origin of that field as a boundary condition, not as something it derives. AFEH does not modify, extend, or supersede any equation, threshold, or verified value of TACD; it evaluates, independently and on their own terms, physical mechanisms that could supply or locally enhance such a field. The candidates are not mutually exclusive: different conditions may favour a different candidate, and the note is not limited to any one season or climate. Four mechanisms are evaluated on their own published numbers, with no site-specific data used in any evaluation: charge layers at the edges of stratiform cloud or fog (consistent with TACD’s requirement, pending replication); ground-level fog electrification (a real, measured effect, found insufficient on its own); wind-driven triboelectric charging of particulates such as snow or dust (found dimensionally self-consistent with TACD’s requirement, and the strongest candidate evaluated); and electrochemical ground current between mineral contrasts, the “geological battery” or self-potential mechanism (evaluated and excluded, short by six orders of magnitude). A fifth mechanism, stress-activated positive-hole currents, is named for completeness and explicitly left unevaluated. Every numerical comparison is reproduced in the accompanying Python script, AFEH_verify.py (7 checks), computed in IEEE 754 double precision against CODATA 2022 constants. A candidate site, Hessdalen, Norway, is named only as a proposed, unconfirmed test case for the wind-driven mechanism, together with a pre-registered decision rule for a retrospective correlation test that has not yet been carried out. No sighting report or site measurement is used as evidence for any evaluation in this note. This is an author’s hypothesis note, version 1.0, not peer-reviewed. No candidate is confirmed, and TACD remains valid, as a chain from ambient field to corona, independently of any outcome here. Where a source is not peer-reviewed, it is treated as consistent with, pending replication, never as confirmation.