Abstract

Intense beams of light propagating through a medium with a positive Kerr nonlinearity can undergo self-focusing provided that their average power is larger than a certain critical power determined by the wavelength and material properties of the medium. Here, we show that for pulses comprising only a few optical cycles, this self-focusing can be inhibited by the presence of significant (normal) dispersion. We derive simple expressions to quantify the threshold power for self-focusing in the presence of dispersion. In addition, we show that under certain conditions, this threshold power can be larger than conventional critical power (for a dispersionless case) by a factor as large as several hundred.

© 2019 Optical Society of America

Few-cycle optical pulses in negative index materials with dispersive permittivity and permeability

Marianne Abémgnigni Njifon, Conrad Bertrand Tabi, and Timoléon Crépin Kofané
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 37(11) A331-A345 (2020)

Few-cycle 10 µm multi-terawatt pulse self-compression in a gas-filled multi-pass cell: a numerical experiment

Michael G. Hastings, Paris Panagiotopoulos, Miroslav Kolesik, Victor Hasson, Sergei Tochitsky, and Jerome V. Moloney
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 39(1) 266-272 (2022)

Influence of generalized focusing of few-cycle Gaussian pulses in attosecond pulse generation

Ebrahim Karimi, Carlo Altucci, Valer Tosa, Raffaele Velotta, and Lorenzo Marrucci
Opt. Express 21(21) 24991-24999 (2013)

Diffraction-ray tube analysis of ultrashort high-intensity laser pulse filamentation in air

Yury Geints, Olga Minina, and Alexander Zemlyanov
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(11) 3209-3217 (2019)

Two-color pulse collapse events in dispersive media

Alexey Sukhinin, Alejandro Aceves, and Jean-Claude Diels
J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 36(10) G62-G67 (2019)