Post-filament self-trapping of ultrashort laser pulses

作者：Mitrofanov A V; Voronin A A; Sidorov Biryukov D A; Andriukaitis G; Floery T; Pugzlys A; Fedotov A B; Mikhailova J M; Panchenko V Ya; Baltuska A; Zheltikov A M^*

来源：Optics Letters, 2014, 39(16): 4659-4662.

DOI：10.1364/OL.39.004659

Laser filamentation is understood to be self-channeling of intense ultrashort laser pulses achieved when the self-focusing because of the Kerr nonlinearity is balanced by ionization-induced defocusing. Here, we show that, right behind the ionized region of a laser filament, ultrashort laser pulses can couple into a much longer light channel, where a stable self-guiding spatial mode is sustained by the saturable self-focusing nonlinearity. In the limiting regime of negligibly low ionization, this post-filamentation beam dynamics converges to a large-scale beam self-trapping scenario known since the pioneering work on saturable self-focusing nonlinearities.

• 出版日期2014-8-15