Abstract
We compare the water condensation and snow formation induced by a femtosecond laser filament with that when the filament is assisted by an aluminum target located at different positions along the filament. We reveal that the laser-filament-induced water condensation and snow formation assisted by the aluminum target are more efficient compared with those obtained without the assistance of the aluminum target. We find that the mass of the snow induced by the laser filament is the largest when the aluminum target is located at the end of the filament, smaller when it is at the middle of the filament, and the smallest at the beginning of the filament. These findings indicate that a higher plasma density and the generation of vortex pairs below the filament are important for enhancing the efficiency and yield of the laser-induced water condensation and precipitation. The higher plasma density provides more cloud condensation nuclei and facilitates the water condensation; vortex pairs below the filament are favourable to the growth of particles up to larger sizes.
Highlights
Femtosecond laser filamentation generated by high-power ultrashort laser pulses originates from the dynamic balance between Kerr self-focusing and defocusing by the self-generated plasma and/or higher-order Kerr terms[1,2]
We investigated femtosecond-laser-filament-induced water condensation and snow formation using only the laser filament, the height of the laser axis relative to the bottom base plate of the cloud chamber was set at 1 cm
Once the bottom base of the chamber was cooled for 20 min, the femtosecond laser pulses were focused into the chamber to generate femtosecond laser filaments, where the temperature and relative humidity were approximately −11 °C and 75%, respectively
Summary
Femtosecond laser filamentation generated by high-power ultrashort laser pulses originates from the dynamic balance between Kerr self-focusing and defocusing by the self-generated plasma and/or higher-order Kerr terms[1,2]. It has been demonstrated that a femtosecond laser filament can induce water condensation in a cloud chamber and the atmosphere[17,18,19]. Several studies on this subject have been reported[20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. Since the metallic target can provide a higher plasma density under laser filament irradiation, an aluminum target available material in our lab was chose It was located at different positions along the filament in the experiments. We observed that aluminum-target-assisted femtosecond-laser-filament-induced water condensation and snow formation were more efficient than those obtained using the laser filament only. The mechanisms of these phenomena were discussed on the basis of the interaction between the femtosecond laser filament and the metallic target
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