Femtosecond filamentation in air and higher-order nonlinearities

Abstract

According to a recent experiment, the instantaneous electronic Kerr effect in air exhibits a strong intensity dependence, the nonlinear refractive index switching sign and crossing over from a self-focusing to a de-focusing nonlinearity. A subsequent theoretical work has demonstrated that this has paradigm-changing consequences for the understanding of filamentation in air, so it is important to subject the idea of higher-order nonlinearities to stringent tests. Here we use numerical modeling to propose an experiment capable of discriminating between the standard and the new intensity-dependent Kerr-effect models.

3 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Ultrashort filaments of light in weakly-ionized, optically-transparent media
• Higher-order Kerr terms allow ionization-free filamentation in gases

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• Effect of a plasma grating on pump-probe experiments near the ionization threshold in gases
• On negative higher-order Kerr effect and filamentation
• Third and fifth harmonics generation by tightly focused femtosecond pulses at 2.2 μm wavelength in air
• Comparative investigation of third and fifth harmonic generation in atomic and molecular gases driven by mid-infrared ultrafast laser pulses
• From higher-order Kerr nonlinearities to quantitative modeling of 3rd and 5th harmonic generation in argon
• Ultrasolitons: multistability and subcritical power threshold from higher-order Kerr terms
• Ab-initio calculations of laser-atom interactions reveal harmonics feedback during macroscopic propagation