2015: Extended laser filaments in air

MSU Physicists in collaboration with their colleagues from Lebedev Physical Institute of the RAS suggested a simple way of extending the length of the fs laser filaments.

The influence of pass-through optics on femtosecond laser pulse filamentation in ambient air is analyzed for the first time both experimentally and numerically. Propagation of a high-power femtosecond laser pulse through solid optical elements introduces spatiotemporal phase modulation due to the Kerr effect. This modulation may have a strong effect on the pulse filamentation in air. It was demonstrated that the phase modulation obtained in the thin pass-through dielectric plate reduces the distance to the filament onset and increases the plasma channel length.

Computer modeling was made on supercomputers Chebyshev and Lomonosov, Lomonosov Moscow State University.

The results of this work have been published in the paper: A.A. Dergachev, A.A. Ionin, V.P. Kandidov, D.V. Mokrousova, L.V. Seleznev, D.V. Sinitsyn, E.S. Sunchugasheva, S.A. Shlenov and A.P. Shustikova, “Effect of nonlinearity in the pass-through optics on femtosecond laser filament in air”, Laser Phys. Lett. 12, 015403 (2015).