Atmospheric turbulence plays an important role in long-range propagation of light pulses. Mid-infrared pulses can propagate in air upto hundreds of meters by forming long channels of plasma due to lower ionization losses compared to near-IR pulses. Such long filamentation channels are useful in atmospheric sensing, remote laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), steering and triggering of electric discharges and other long-range applications. We study the effects of atmospheric turbulence in long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) femtosecond filamentation in air. We numerically investigate the combined effects of turbulence and nonlinearity in the long-range propagation of LWIR pulses at 6 μm. We model the nonlinear response of the atmosphere by including Kerr effect, multiphoton-ionization and rotational Raman effects in air the dispersive response of several atmospheric gas species such as N2, O2, Ar, CO2 CH4 and H2O. We model the turbulence using a phase-screen model. The inhomogeneous medium is represented by a series of phase screens located at regular intervals along the propagation direction. This provides an understanding of the robustness of long range filamentation and propagation of LWIR pulses over turbulent medium which essential for several long range applications including free-space optical communication.
Pulse propagation through hollow-core fibers (HCFs) filled with noble gas is a stable and efficient technique for pulse self-compression. The scalability of soliton dynamics in gas-filled HCFs, varying over a large range of energies, from sub-μJ to above mJ, allows to tune the energy of the generated few-cycle pulses too a great extent. Scaling relations can be used to produce propagation dynamics and effects that are invariant and essentially identical for multiple sets of input conditions. But, for the same input soliton order, the scaling relations derived under different dispersion conditions, such as different gas pressure, result in somewhat different scaling laws. This leads to an ambiguity in the compression factor and compression length for any particular soliton order N. It is thus necessary to find an accurate soliton order which can describe the self-compression dynamics over different dispersion conditions. We numerically simulate soliton self-compression in an argon gas-filled HCF across a wide range dispersion conditions and present an accurate soliton order for better understanding of the self-compression behavior. We introduce an effective soliton order Neff, for explaining the behavior of soliton dynamics in systems with high third order dispersion (TOD). This provides us with universal scaling laws for generating high-energy few-cycle pulses, which are critical for generating single and trains of attosecond pulses, as well as electron and ion acceleration strategies in intense laser pulses.
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