AbstractInteracting streamers are commonly found in natural plasma discharges, such as lightning, jets and sprites, but are poorly understood at present. In this paper, we report a three‐dimensional modeling study of two interacting streamers simultaneously initiated from identical plasma columns in a uniform ambient field. Simulation results show that the streamers no longer propagate in the direction of the ambient field due to strong repulsion between them. The results also show that the peak field in the streamer head determines the direction of streamer propagation, and that the two streamers propagate in separate directions. We further conjecture that they will be unlikely to merge later on. Finally, the interacting streamers still grow exponentially, with a growth rate similar to an isolated streamer under the same condition.
