Water vapor based dispersion management in a high-pressure gas cell

Abstract

We use a mixture of a high pressure gas with a minor (about 1 percent) addition of variable density water vapor to control group velocity dispersion of a near-infrared femtosecond pulse and switch it from normal to anomalous regime in the short-wavelength vicinity of the absorption band.We have shown numerically the formation of typical for anomalous dispersion O-wave frequency-angular spectrum with full suppression of conical emission on the short-wavelength side for 1.3-μm femtosecond pulse filamenting in the mixture of 30-bar nitrogen and 0.4-bar water vapor.