Superfilamentation in air

Phys Rev Lett. 2014 Jun 6;112(22):223902. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.223902. Epub 2014 Jun 4.

Abstract

The interaction between a large number of laser filaments brought together using weak external focusing leads to the emergence of few filamentary structures reminiscent of standard filaments, but carrying a higher intensity. The resulting plasma is measured to be 1 order of magnitude denser than for short-scale filaments. This new propagation regime is dubbed superfilamentation. Numerical simulations of a nonlinear envelope equation provide good agreement with experiments.