Femtosecond laser pulses filamenting in various gases are shown to generate long- lived quasi-stationary cylindrical depressions or 'holes' in the gas density. For our experimental conditions, these holes range up to several hundred microns in diameter with gas density depressions up to ~20%. The holes decay by thermal diffusion on millisecond timescales. We show that high repetition rate filamentation and supercontinuum generation can be strongly affected by these holes, which should also affect all other experiments employing intense high repetition rate laser pulses interacting with gases.
We demonstrate that femtosecond filaments can set up an extended and robust thermal waveguide structure in air with a lifetime of several milliseconds, making possible the very-long-range guiding and distant projection of high-energy laser pulses and high-average power beams. As a proof of principle, we demonstrate guiding of 110-mJ, 7-ns, 532-nm pulses with 90% throughput over ∼15 Rayleigh lengths in a 70-cm-long air waveguide generated by the long time-scale thermal relaxation of an array of femtosecond filaments. The guided pulse was limited only by our available laser energy. In general, these waveguides should be robust against the effects of thermal blooming of extremely high-average-power laser beams.
We present the first experimental evidence, supported by theory and simulation, of spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs). A STOV is an optical vortex with phase and energy circulation in a spatiotemporal plane. Depending on the sign of the material dispersion, the local electromagnetic energy flow is saddle or spiral about the STOV. STOVs are a fundamental element of the nonlinear collapse and subsequent propagation of short optical pulses in material media, and conserve topological charge, constraining their birth, evolution, and annihilation. We measure a self-generated STOV consisting of a ring-shaped null in the electromagnetic field about which the phase is spiral, forming a dynamic torus that is concentric with and tracks the propagating pulse. Our results, here obtained for optical pulse collapse and filamentation in air, are generalizable to a broad class of nonlinearly propagating waves.
We investigate high-power terahertz (THz) generation in two-color laser filamentation using terawatt (TW) lasers including a 0.5 TW, 1 kHz system, as well as 2 and 30 TW systems both operating at 10 Hz. With these lasers, we study the macroscopic effect in filamentation that governs THz output energy yields and radiation profiles in the far field. We also characterize the radiation spectra at a broad range of frequencies covering radio-micro-waves to infrared frequencies. In particular, our 1 kHz THz source can provide high-energy (>1 µJ), high average power (>1 mW), intense (>1 MV cm −1 ) and broadband (0.01-60 THz) THz radiation via two-color filamentation in air. Based on our scaling law, an ∼30 TW laser can produce >0.1 mJ of THz radiation with multigigawatt peak power in ∼1.5 m long filamentation.
We present time-resolved measurements of the gas acoustic dynamics following interaction of spatial single- and higher-mode 50 fs, 800 nm pulses in air at 10 Hz and 1 kHz repetition rates. Results are in excellent agreement with hydrodynamic simulations. Under no conditions for single filaments do we find on-axis enhancement of gas density; this occurs only with multifilaments. We also investigate the propagation of probe beams in the gas density profile induced by a single extended filament. We find that light trapping in the expanding annular acoustic wave can create the impression of on-axis guiding in a limited temporal window.
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