In electrical engineering, spikes are fast, short duration electrical transients in voltage (voltage spikes), current (current spikes), or transferred energy (energy spikes) in an electrical circuit. Fast, short duration electrical transients (overvoltages) in the electric potential of a circuit are typically caused by In the design of critical infrastructure and military hardware, one concern is of pulses produced by nuclear explosions, whose nuclear electromagnetic pulses distribute large energies in frequencies from 1 kHz into the gigahertz range through the atmosphere.