Abstract

The advent of intense femtosecond laser pulses has introduced many challenging propagation-related problems, with implications for atmospheric propagation, optical communications, and laser-plasma interactions. In this work, we numerically study the situation where the combination of diffraction, normal dispersion, and cubic nonlinearity lead to pulse splitting.^1,2 In particular, we focus on effects that lead to recently observed asymmetries in the pulse splitting.^3,4 In this regime, we find the dynamics are mainly determined by the Ramati effect, the shock terms, and the initial third-order temporal phase modulation. The effects due to nonparaxiality come into play at higher intensities.

© 1998 Optical Society of America