Observation of Conical Waves in Focusing, Dispersive, and Dissipative Kerr Media

Abstract

Excitation of unbalanced-Bessel beams by a gradual increase of nonlinearity in a water sample outlines the achievement of the first ever observed quasimonochromatic wave packet that propagates stably for hundreds of Rayleigh lengths in a focusing and dispersive Kerr medium, i.e., in the absence of spectral broadening and conical emission. A modulational instability analysis reveals the key role of nonlinear dissipation in quenching the growth of spatiotemporal unstable modes.

Nondiffracting Bessel plasmons

“…The possibility of independently tuning the phase and group velocities (GVs) of a BB opens the possibility of a number of applications in nonlinear optics [8,9]. In particular, a number of phenomena was observed: frequency-doubling [10] and high-order harmonics in the extreme ultraviolet [11] using BBs, resonant self-trapping of BBs in plasmas [12], the spontaneous formation of unbalanced BBs during ultrashort laser pulse filamentation in Kerr media [13], and high Raman conversion efficiency in the formation of GV-matched X-wave pulses [14].…”

Kerr-induced spontaneous Bessel beam formation in the regime of strong two-photon absorption

“…These additional features are typical instabilities associated with intense Bessel beams as observed in Ref. [14] and show that simply increasing the input power will not lead to the usual filamentation dynamics observed with K ≥ 3. Indeed for the case K = 3 a Gaussian input pulse reshaping was reported ( [15]) in which a Bessel-like profile was experimentally observed, but only as a purely transient regime that then quickly evolved into a spatiotemporal X Wave [16].…”

On the dynamics of Airy beams in nonlinear media with nonlinear losses

“…As pointed out in [21], a stability analysis of NABs would help to elucidate this question. In this respect the situation is different with Bessel beams, where unstable nonlinear propagation regimes are clearly identified [21,26].…”