On the generation of polarization-dependent supercontinuum and third harmonic in air

Abstract

Filamentation and supercontinuum (SC) generation occur in transparent media during the propagation of intense femtosecond laser pulses. We report experimental results of polarization-dependent SC generation and third harmonic generation (THG) in air using intense 40 fs, 800 nm pulses under varying focusing conditions. We observe that tight focusing enhances the extent of the SC compared to when there is weak external focusing. Moreover, we observe that when the incident beam is linearly polarized the SC yield is more than that obtained using circularly polarized light of the same energy, but this difference reduces as focusing becomes tighter and depolarization begins to take effect. We have also carried out measurement for THG in air under the same conditions as for SC generation. A THG efficiency of 0.5% is measured for linearly polarized light in air. Although conservation of spin angular momentum precludes THG with circularly polarized light, we do observe THG with circularly polarized light in our experiments because of depolarization effects. We show that THG measurements allow in situ measurements of the extent to which incident light is depolarized.