Self-guiding of femtosecond light pulses in condensed media: plasma generation versus chromatic dispersion (Q2507805)

This paper provides a theoretical study of the self-guiding of ultrashort laser pulses propagating in fused silica, with emphasis on the separation between the regimes dominated by defocusing due to chromatic dispersion and the strongly self-focused regimes associated with plasma generation. The model on which the analysis is based is derived from Maxwell's equations in Section 2 and is constituted of a nonlinear Schrödinger equation for the pulse propagation coupled to an equation for the growth of free electron density. It accounts for high-order dispersion, space-time focusing, self-steepening, and plasma generation. Section 3 proposes analytical estimates of the boundaries between regimes dominated by chromatic dispersion and those dominated by plasma emission as functions of the dispersion coefficient and the peak input power, for both normal and anomalous dispersion. The analytical estimates are checked against numerical simulations. In the three next sections, the spatio-temporal and spectral dynamics of self-guided pulses are studied numerically in detail for three different dispersion regimes (namely: normal, anomalous, and vanishing group velocity dispersion), and for different peak input powers. Particular attention is paid to the evolution of the dynamics along the transition region between the dispersion- and plasma-emission-dominated regimes. Finally, the effect of a Raman-delayed Kerr response is considered in Section 7.