Abstract

We study the filamentation in air of multi-millijoule optical vortices and compare them with the classical filamentation regime. The femtosecond vortex beam generates multiple plasma filaments organized in a cylindrical geometry. This plasma configuration evolves into a meter-scale tubular neutral gas column that can be used as a waveguide for nanosecond laser pulses at 532 nm. It appears that optical vortices produce a more uniform heating along the propagation axis, when compared with Gaussian or super-Gaussian beams, and that the resulting low-density channel is poorly sensitive to the laser input power thanks to the combination of filamentation intensity clamping and phase vorticity.

© 2022 Optica Publishing Group

Electrical conductance of near-infrared femtosecond air filaments in the multi-filament regime

M. Burger, P. J. Skrodzki, J. Nees, and I. Jovanovic
Opt. Lett. 43(22) 5520-5523 (2018)

Measurements of fluence profiles in femtosecond laser filaments in air

Xiao-Long Liu, Weibo Cheng, Massimo Petrarca, and Pavel Polynkin
Opt. Lett. 41(20) 4751-4754 (2016)

Wake dynamics of air filaments generated by high-energy picosecond laser pulses at 1 kHz repetition rate

A. Higginson, Y. Wang, H. Chi, A. Goffin, I. Larkin, H. M. Milchberg, and J. J. Rocca
Opt. Lett. 46(21) 5449-5452 (2021)

Direct imaging of the acoustic waves generated by femtosecond filaments in air

J. K. Wahlstrand, N. Jhajj, E. W. Rosenthal, S. Zahedpour, and H. M. Milchberg
Opt. Lett. 39(5) 1290-1293 (2014)

Taming femtosecond laser filamentation and supercontinuum generation in liquids using neural networks

Panagiotis Konstantakis, Paul E. Dufour, Maria Manousidaki, Anastasios D. Koulouklidis, and Stelios Tzortzakis
Opt. Lett. 47(21) 5445-5448 (2022)