Beyond leading-order logarithmic scaling in the catastrophic self-focusing of a laser beam in Kerr media

Abstract

We study the catastrophic stationary self-focusing (collapse) of laser beam in nonlinear Kerr media. The width of a self-similar solutions near collapse distance $z=z_c$ obeys $(z_c-z)^{1/2}$ scaling law with the well-known leading order modification of loglog type $\propto (\ln|\ln(z_c-z)|)^{-1/2}$. We show that the validity of the loglog modification requires double-exponentially large amplitudes of the solution $\sim {10^{10}}^{100}$, which is unrealistic to achieve in either physical experiments or numerical simulations. We derive a new equation for the adiabatically slow parameter which determines the system self-focusing across a large range of solution amplitudes. Based on this equation we develop a perturbation theory for scaling modifications beyond the leading loglog. We show that for the initial pulse with the optical power moderately above ($\lesssim 1.2$) the critical power of self-focusing, the new scaling agrees with numerical simulations beginning with amplitudes around only three times above of the initial pulse.