Dynamics of femtosecond synthesized coronary profile laser beams filamentation in air

Abstract

Multiple filamentation in air of high-power ultrashort laser radiation with transverse intensity profile resembling a "corona" composed by incoherent combining of several annularly distributed independent top-hat sub-beams is theoretically studied. Through the numerical solution of time-averaged nonlinear Schrodinger equation, we study the spatio-angular dynamics of synthesized near-infrared "corona-beam" (CB) along the optical path by varying the number and power of the beamlets (corona-spikes). For the first time to our knowledge, the evident advances in the multiple filamentation region manipulating of synthesized CB are demonstrated. Particularly, by adjusting the number and aperture of the constituting sub-beams it makes possible to significantly delay the CB filamentation onset distance and increase the filamentation length in air. In addition, at the post-filamentation stage of femtosecond pulse propagation under certain conditions the synthesized corona-beams exhibit significantly lower angular divergence of its most intense part (post-filamentation light channel) compared to the beams with regular uni-modal intensity profiles (Gaussian, plateau-like) that provides enhancing of laser power delivered to the receiver over the atmospheric links.