Abstract:We show theoretically and demonstrate experimentally that collapsing elliptically-polarized laser beams experience a nonlinear ellipse rotation that is highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the input power. For arbitrarily small fluctuations in the input power and after a sufficiently large propagation distance, the polarization angle becomes uniformly distributed in [0, 2π] from shot-toshot. We term this novel phenomenon loss of polarization. We perform experiments in fused-silica glass, nitrogen gas and … Show more
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