Abstract
We predict that long wavelength self-trapped multi-terawatt pulses can be sustained over multiple kilometers in the atmosphere. Unlike filaments, these pulses exhibit low loss propagation and retain most of their launch power at range. A novel mechanism involving an aggregation of weakly linear and nonlinear cumulative optical responses is shown to be responsible and is dominated by an ultrafast dynamical lensing resulting from a field intensity driven many-body Coulomb mediated free electron polarization associated with spatially separated species in the gas. An initial few picosecond pulse can compress down to 140 fs over multiple kilometers.
© 2017 Optical Society of America
Full Article | PDF ArticleMore Like This
Paris Panagiotopoulos, Miroslav Kolesik, Sergei Tochitsky, Stephan W. Koch, and Jerome V. Moloney
Opt. Lett. 44(12) 3122-3125 (2019)
Vladimir Zvorykin, Andrey Ionin, Daria Mokrousova, Leonid Seleznev, Igor’ Smetanin, Elena Sunchugasheva, Nikolai Ustinovskii, and Alexey Shutov
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(10) G25-G32 (2019)
Anand Bahl, Vinay Pramod Majety, Armin Scrinzi, and Miroslav Kolesik
Opt. Lett. 42(12) 2295-2298 (2017)