Abstract

Laser-induced filamentation is one of the most exciting recent discoveries of optical physics [1, 2]. In ultrafast optical science, this phenomenon finds growing applications as a method of pulse compression [3, 4], enabling the generation of high-peak-power carrier-envelope-phase-stable few-cycle optical field waveforms. However, because of a strong spatial chirp acquired by a laser beam in a filament, spatial filtering with a diaphragm is typically needed for the selection of the paraxial part of the beam, where the highest efficiency of pulse compression is achieved. This beam aperturing dramatically reduces the energy of compressed light pulses.

© 2011 IEEE