Ultrashort filaments of light in weakly ionized, optically transparent media
By Luc Bergé, Stefan Skupin, Rachel Nuter, Jérôme Kasparian, J. Wolf. 2006
844 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Modern laser sources nowadays deliver ultrashort light pulses reaching few cycles in duration and peak powers exceeding several terawatt (TW). When such pulses propagate through optically transparent media, they first self-focus in space and grow in intensity, until they generate a tenuous plasma by photo-ionization. For free electron densities and beam intensities below their breakdown limits, these pulses evolve as self-guided objects, resulting from successive equilibria between the Kerr focusing process, the chromatic dispersion of the medium and the defocusing action of the electron plasma. Discovered one decade ago, this self-channeling mechanism reveals a new physics, widely extending the frontiers of nonlinear optics. Implications include long-distance propagation of TW beams in the atmosphere, supercontinuum emission, pulse shortening as well as high-order harmonic generation. This review presents the landmarks of the 10-odd-year progress in this field. Particular emphasis is laid on the theoretical modeling of the propagation equations, whose physical ingredients are discussed from numerical simulations. The dynamics of single filaments created over laboratory scales in various materials such as noble gases, liquids and dielectrics reveal new perspectives in pulse shortening techniques. Far-field spectra provide promising diagnostics. Attention is also paid to the multifilamentation instability of broad beams, breaking up the energy distribution into small-scale cells along the optical path. The robustness of the resulting filaments in adverse weathers, their large conical emission exploited for multipollutant remote sensing, nonlinear spectroscopy and the possibility of guiding electric discharges in air are finally addressed on the basis of experimental results.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Mechanics of Materials, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/097f46997133c32c381ea4f158376d7f8d65abad
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
- Amir Abdolvand
- John C. Travers
- D. Skryabin
- Andrey Gorbach
- Nicolas Y. Joly
- Johannes Nold
- Wonkeun Chang
- P. Russell
In Nuclear and High Energy Physics
Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium: Looking at a soliton through the prism of optical supercontinuum (2010, background): “Supercontinuum generation has been of course known outside the fiber context in bulk solids, liquids and gases, see, e.g. (Berge et al., 2007; Couairon and Mysyrowicz, 2007; Kolesik and Moloney, 2008), where all three space dimensions are important.”
- Ultrafast nonlinear optics in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fibers [Invited] (2011, background): “Finally, in filaments in free space, stable self-guidance requires the free-electron density to be fixed relative to the Kerr nonlinearity [92,99], again limiting the range of possible dynamics.”
- Hollow-core photonic crystal fibres for gas-based nonlinear optics (2014, background): “(3) n01(λ,p,T) = n(2)gas (λ,p,T)– ~– 1 + δ(λ) – 4π2a2 2ρ0 8π2a2 λ(2)z(2)01 ρ(p,T) λ(2)z(2)01”