Abstract

By investigating the propagation of powerful (P>>P_cr) femtosecond laser pulse in water we have discovered the new regime of the self-channelling of laser pulse that requires input power significantly overcoming critical one and very tight focusing conditions (NA>0.3). According to the recently published work [1], where the authors represented the results in air, we called our regime of filamentation as superfilamentation. This work is a pioneering attempt to investigate the superfilament and its post-effects on nanosecond and microsecond timescales in water under tight focusing geometry. Additionally for the first time we found out the unique experimental conditions demonstrated controllable reversible transition from the regime of multiple filamentation to superfilamentation in condensed matter.

© 2015 IEEE