Abstract
For more than one decade, a growing interest has raised in research activities linked to femtosecond (fs) filaments generated in air from ultrashort laser sources and their current applications such as, e.g., Lidar remote sensing or electrical discharge triggering. High-power ultrashort laser pulses can self-channel in the atmosphere over spectacular distances though the dynamical equilibrium between Kerr self-focusing, diffraction and photoionization. This balance promotes narrow waveguides conveying high intensity, along with thin plasma channels. The physics governing the propagation of short (sub-100 femtosecond) intense laser pulses in air can be very different from that of longer pulses, due to, for instance, group velocity dispersion, self-steepening, space-time focusing or the time dependence of the Kerr nonlinearity. The latter consists of an instantaneous and delayed part, which respectively originate from the bound electron response and the inertial molecular dynamics. The respective weight of both effects depends on the pulse duration, and has a noticeable influence on the beam evolution.
© 2007 IEEE
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