Suppressing small-scale self-focusing of high-power femtosecond pulses

Abstract

It was shown experimentally that for a 65-fs 17-J pulse, the effect of filamentation instability, also known as small-scale self-focusing, is much weaker than that predicted by stationary and nonstationary theoretical models for high B-integral values. Although this discrepancy has been left unexplained at the moment, in practice no signs of filamentation may allow a breakthrough in nonlinear pulse post-compression at high laser energy.

Keywords

• B-integral
• cubic Kerr nonlinearity
• filamentation instability
• high-power femtosecond laser
• nonlinear post-compression