Conical Emission Induced by the Filamentation of Femtosecond Vortex Beams in Water

Abstract

Conical emission is a typical nonlinear phenomenon that occurs during the filamentation of femtosecond laser pulses in transparent media. In this work, the conical emission induced by two kinds of typical vortex beams (i.e., Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) and Bessel–Gaussian (BG) beams) in water is experimentally studied. By recording the light spots of different spectra components from the supercontinuum induced by the vortex beams, the characteristics of the conical emission induced by femtosecond vortex beams are studied. It is found that the spots of the supercontinuum induced by the two kinds of vortex beams differ greatly from each other. The spots of the supercontinuum induced by the BG beams are a set of concentric rings like a rainbow with a white center, while the white light spots in the case of the LG beams are circular white disks, which are different from the commonly observed white light spots. By measuring the maximum divergence angle, it is observed that the divergence angle increases with a decrease in the wavelength, while it is merely affected by the topological charge, which is explained by the formation mechanism of conical emission in terms of self-phase modulation. Based on the observed results, we discuss the transfer of optical angular momentum during the supercontinuum induced by the filamentation of femtosecond vortex beams. This work may help to better understand the transfer of optical angular momentum in non-optical parametric processes as well as the interaction of high-intensity pulses with matter.

Keywords

• conical emission
• vortex beams
• topological charge
• orbital angular momentum
• femtosecond filament