Optical guiding of an intense laser beam propagating in uniform plasmas is analyzed by means of the variational method. The focusing properties of the beam are shown to be governed by the laser power as well as the laser intensity. An increase in the laser intensity leads to an enhancement of ponderomotive self-channeling but a stronger weakening of relativistic self-focusing. The oscillations of the beam spot size along the propagation distance come from the variability of the focusing force in terms of the laser intensity; and the dependence on the laser intensity is negligible in the weakly relativistic limit.
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