Conical emission from laser filaments and higher-order Kerr effect in air

Abstract

We numerically investigate the conical emission (CE) from ultrashort laser filaments, both considering and disregarding the higher-order Kerr effect (HOKE). While the consideration of HOKE has almost no influence on the predicted CE from collimated beams, differences arise for tightly focused beams. This difference is attributed to the different relative contributions of the non-linear focus and of the modulational instability over the whole filament length.

11 pages, 3 figures, 1 Movie

References in corpus (4)

• Ultrashort filaments of light in weakly-ionized, optically-transparent media
• Higher-order Kerr terms allow ionization-free filamentation in gases
• Transition from plasma- to Kerr-driven laser filamentation
• Experimental Tests of the New Paradigm for Laser Filamentation in Gases