Wilson's Atmospheric Electron Accelerator: A Centennial Perspective

Abstract As of the time of writing this letter, we mark the centennial of Wilson's runaway electrons proposed in 1925. Owing to instrumentation limitations, Wilson and his students could not detect the particles anticipated by theory Chilingarian et al. (2025, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024jd042350 ). A hundred years later, we ask: have we, as a scientific community, been able to detect electrons accelerated in atmospheric electric fields? In this letter, we highlight the main experiments that have attempted to observe these energetic electrons, which often discussed in the context of thunderstorm ground enhancements (TGEs). Only a handful of attempts have been made so far to detect the Wilsonian electrons, and reliable detections of electron signatures of the atmospheric particle accelerator remain extremely rare. We provide a brief summary of the current state of the hunt for these electrons and focus on recently observed TGE, which is the brightest on record.