Range of plasma filaments created in air by a multi-terawatt femtosecond laser

Grégoire Méchain (1) , Ciro d'Amico (1) , Yves-Bernard André (1) , Stellios Tzortzakis (1) , Michel Franco (1) , Bernard Prade (1) , André Mysyrowicz (1) , Arnaud Couairon (2) , Estelle Salmon (3) , Roland Sauerbrey (4)

1 LOA - Laboratoire d'optique appliquée
2 CPHT - Centre de Physique Théorique [Palaiseau]
3 LASIM - Laboratoire de Spectrométrie Ionique et Moléculaire
4 IOQ - Institut fur Optik und Quantenelectronik

The propagation of a multi-terawatt femtosecond laser pulse in air is studied as a function of initial chirp. The chirp conditions for optimising air ionisation at long distance are presented. Ionisation channels are observed over a distance reaching 400 m.

Keywords: filamentation; nonlinear optics

Domains: Optics [physics.optics]

Grégoire Méchain, Ciro d'Amico, Yves-Bernard André, Stellios Tzortzakis, Michel Franco, et al.. Range of plasma filaments created in air by a multi-terawatt femtosecond laser. Optics Communications, 2005, 247 (1), pp.171-180. ⟨10.1016/j.optcom.2004.11.052⟩. ⟨hal-00463613⟩