Experimental investigation of spatiotemporal evolution of femtosecond laser pulses during small-scale self-focusing

Abstract

Small-scale self-focusing (SF) causes rapid increase in the partial spatial intensity, breaking up the spatial profile of the beam into an intensity increasing zone (IZ) and a non-increasing zone (NIZ). We measure the evolutions of the pulse width at the IZ and NIZ with small-scale SF, and our results show that the pulse width at the IZ becomes narrower with increasing partial spatial intensity. The pulse width at the NIZ is almost unchanged with increasing laser power. We find that our experimental results are in good agreement with an approximate theoretical analysis.