  After centuries, the long-standing problem of the nature of ball lightning
may be closer to a solution. The relativistic-microwave theory of ball
lightning recently proposed by Wu accounts for many of the leading
characteristics of ball lightning, which most previous theories have failed to
do. It involves the impact of a lightning-caused relativistic electron bunch to
soil, producing an EM pulse that forms a plasma bubble. While the theory
presents a plausible account of ball-lightning formation, storing
electromagnetic energy long enough to account for the observed lifetime of such
objects was not demonstrated. Here we show how such a structure can develop the
high Q factor (~10^10) needed for the observed lifetimes of ~seconds for ball
lightning, and show that the structure is radially stable, given certain
assumptions.
