Modulation instability in filamentary self-compression

Abstract

We numerically analyze filamentary propagation for various media and input pulse parameters and show that temporal self-compression can greatly benefit from refocusing events. Analyzing the dynamical behavior in the second focal spot, it turns out that a dispersive temporal break-up may appear due to the emission of a hyperbolic shock wave from the self-steepened trailing edge of the pulse. This break-up event in the refocus enhances the self-compression capabilities of laser filaments, enabling up to 12-fold temporal compression. Only slightly perturbing the input pulse parameters, we further identify a regime in which refocusing events give rise to extended subdiffractive propagation in a weakly ionized channel.