Remote laser in air based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) has produced rather well-collimated coherent beams in both backward and forward propagation directions [1-3], opening up possibilities for new remote sensing approaches [4,5]. The remote ASEbased lasers were shown to enable operation either at ~391 and 337 nm using molecular nitrogen or at ~845 nm using molecular oxygen as gain medium, depending on the employed pump lasers. To date, a multi-wavelength laser in air that allows for dynamically switching the operating wavelength has not yet been achieved, although this type of laser is certainly of high importance for detecting multiple hazard gases. In this Letter, we demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, a harmonic-seeded switchable multi-wavelength laser in air driven by intense mid-infrared femtosecond laser pulses. Furthermore, population inversion in the multi-wavelength remote laser occurs at an ultrafast time-scale (i.e., less than ~200 fs) owing to direct formation of excited molecular nitrogen ions by strong-field ionization of inner-valence electrons, which is fundamentally different from the previously reported pumping mechanisms based either on electron recombination of ionized molecular nitrogen or on resonant two-photon excitation of atomic oxygen fragments resulting from resonant two-photon dissociation of molecular oxygen. The bright multi-wavelength laser in air opens the perspective for remote detection of multiple pollutants based on nonlinear spectroscopy [6].

Remote or standoff detection of greenhouse gases, air pollutants, and biological agents with innovative ultrafast laser technology attracts growing interests in recent years. Hybrid femtosecond/picosecond coherent Raman spectroscopy is considered as one of the most versatile techniques due to its great advantages in terms of detection sensitivity and chemical specificity. However, the simultaneous requirement for the femtosecond pump and the picosecond probe increases the complexity of optical system. Herein, we demonstrate that air lasing naturally created inside a filament can serve as an ideal light source to probe Raman coherence excited by the femtosecond pump, producing coherent Raman signal with molecular vibrational signatures. The combination of pulse self-compression effect and air lasing action during filamentation improves Raman excitation efficiency and greatly simplifies the experimental setup. The air-lasing-assisted Raman spectroscopy was applied to quantitatively detect greenhouse gases mixed in air, and it was found that the minimum detectable concentrations of CO2 and SF6 can reach 0.1% and 0.03%, respectively. The ingenious designs, especially the optimization of pump-seed delay and the choice of perpendicular polarization, ensure a high detection sensitivity and signal stability. Moreover, it is demonstrated that this method can be used for simultaneously measuring CO2 and SF6 gases and distinguishing 12CO2 and 13CO2. The developed scheme provides a new route for high-sensitivity standoff detection and combustion diagnosis.

We investigate the interwoven dynamic evolutions of neutral nitrogen molecules together with nitrogen ions created through transient tunnel ionization in an intense laser field. By treating the molecules as open quantum systems, it is found that considering real-time injection of ions and strong couplings among their electronic states, nitrogen molecular ions are primarily populated in the electronically excited states, rather than staying in the ground state as predicted by the well-known tunneling theory. The unexpected result is attributed to sub-cycle switch-on of timedependent polarization by transient ionization and dynamic Stark shift mediated near-resonant multiphoton transitions. Their combined contribution also causes that the vibrational distribution of N + 2 does not comply with Franck-Condon principle. These findings corroborate the mechanism of nitrogen molecular ion lasing and are likely to be universal. The present work opens a new route to explore the important role of transient ionization injection in strong-field induced non-equilibrium dynamics.The fundamental process of strong field ionization of atoms by intense ultrashort laser pulses occurs at attosecond timescale [1-3] and lasts for pulse lengths in femtoseconds. The temporal confined strong field ionization (SFI) creates broad bandwidth non-stationary ionic states along with launching of attosecond electron wavepacket forming the foundation of attoseond physics [4][5][6][7][8]. One of the key problem is how the coherence of the ionic states affect the subsequent ultrafast nonequilibrium evolution ranging from charge migration in molecules [9], electron transport in condense matter [10] to ultrafast laser processing of materials [11]. It is particular intriguing to question wether the further interaction of the ions with lasers can be considered independently by assuming the prior ionization is completed?Recent experiments indicate that the interplay of subcycle SFI and the followed ion-laser coupling is indispensable for nitrogen molecular ion lasing [12][13][14][15][16] which suggests the new possibility to manipulate the ion coherence upon its creation toward ion-based quantum optics. While SFI itself can be described well by the celebrated Keldysh tunneling theory [17], a complete model treating both ionization of neutrals and laser-ion couplings on the equal footing is still lacking. Theoretically, dealing with bounded multi-electron problem is already a difficult task, it is even challenging for open quantum many-body systems when ionization is involved. Exact time-dependent multilelectron theories are limited to two electrons cases [18] or struggling with ionization-induced derivative discontinuities in density-functionals [19]. A lot of theoretical works have devoted to the coherent ionic evolution in a multi-channel formalism [20,21] but the ion-laser coupling within the ionization process remains elusive.The current work attempts to address the fundamental question of how the transient SFI will influence the quantum states of th...

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Atmospheric lasing has aroused much interest in the past few years. The 'air-laser' opens promising potential for remote chemical sensing of trace gases with high sensitivity and specificity. At present, several approaches have been successfully implemented for generating highly coherent laser beams in atmospheric condition, including both amplified-spontaneous emission, and narrow-bandwidth stimulated emission in the forward direction in the presence of self-generated or externally injected seed pulses. Here, we report on generation of multiple-wavelength Raman lasers from nitrogen molecular ions ( + N 2 ), driven by intense mid-infrared laser fields. Intuitively, the approach appears problematic for the small nonlinear susceptibility of + N 2 ions, whereas the efficiency of Raman laser can be significantly promoted in near-resonant condition. More surprisingly, a Raman laser consisting of a supercontinuum spanning from ∼310 to ∼392 nm has been observed resulting from a series nearresonant nonlinear processes including four-wave mixing, stimulated Raman scattering and cross phase modulation. To date, extreme nonlinear optics in molecular ions remains largely unexplored, which provides an alternative means for air-laser-based remote sensing applications.