Remote creation of strong and coherent emissions in air with two-color ultrafast laser pulses

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate generation of strong narrow-bandwidth emissions with excellent coherent properties at ~391 nm and ~428 nm from molecular ions of nitrogen inside a femtosecond filament in air by an orthogonally polarized two-color driver field (i. e., 800 nm laser pulse and its second harmonic). The durations of the coherent emissions at 391 nm and 428 nm are measured to be ~2.4 ps and ~7.8 ps respectively, both of which are much longer than the duration of the pump and its second harmonic pulses. Furthermore, the measured temporal decay characteristics of the excited molecular systems suggest an "instantaneous" population inversion mechanism that may be achieved in molecular nitrogen ions at an ultrafast time scale comparable to the 800 nm pump pulse.

19 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (3)

• High gain backward lasing in air
• High-brightness switchable multi-wavelength remote laser in air
• Harmonic-seeded remote laser emissions in N2-Ar, N2-Xe and N2-Ne mixtures: a comparative study

Cited by in corpus (20)

• Population Redistribution among Multiple Electronic States of Molecular Nitrogen Ions in Strong Laser Fields
• Recollision induced superradiance of ionized nitrogen molecules
• Self-seeded lasing in ionized air pumped by 800 nm femtosecond laser pulses
• Backward stimulated radiation from filaments in Nitrogen gas and air pumped by circularly polarized 800 nm femtosecond laser pulses
• Signature of superradiance from a nitrogen gas plasma channel produced by strong field ionization
• Rotational Quantum Beat Lasing Without Inversion
• Lasing of ambient air with microjoule pulse energy pumped by a multi terawatt IR femtosecond laser
• Gain dynamics of a free-space nitrogen laser pumped by circularly polarized femtosecond laser pulses
• Real-time observation of dynamics in rotational molecular wave packets by use of "air laser" spectroscopy
• Near-resonant Raman amplification in the rotational quantum wavepackets of nitrogen molecular ions generated by strong field ionization
• Coherent control of superradiance from nitrogen ions pumped with femtosecond pulses
• Extreme nonlinear Raman interaction of an ultrashort nitrogen ion laser with an impulsively excited molecular wavepacket
• Exit momentum and instantaneous ionization rate of nonadiabatic tunneling ionization in elliptically polarized laser fields
• Quantum erasing of laser emission in N${}_2^{+}$
• Amplification of light pulses with orbital angular momentum (OAM) in nitrogen ions lasing
• Control of ${\text{N}}_2^{+}$ Air Lasing
• Controlling the polarization of nitrogen ion lasing
• Externally seeded backward lasing radiation from femtosecond laser filament in nitrogen gas
• Backward air lasing actions induced by femtosecond laser filamentation: influence of population inversion lifetime
• Lasing without population inversion in air