Abstract
Recently there has been considerable interest in the investigation of self-focusing of femtosecond optical pulses. For femtosecond pulses, the effect of material dispersion increases the self-focusing threshold and can lead to temporal splitting of the pulse, supercontinuum generation, and conical emission.1,2 Lately a striking observation has been reported on the propagation of intense femtosecond pulses in air with powers in the gigawatt range3 where self-channeling of the pulse beam has been observed over distances of several tens of meters. The self-trapping has been interpreted as a counterbalance of the self-focusing due to the Kerr effect and the defocusing effect due to the formation of a low-density plasma.
© 1998 Optical Society of America
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