Temporal self-restoration of compressed optical filaments

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that self-compressed optical filaments can recover from significant nonlinear and dispersive distortions during propagation through gas-glass interfaces, highlighting a self-healing mechanism that enhances pulse robustness.

Contribution

It reveals a novel self-healing process in optical filaments that maintains pulse integrity despite extreme nonlinear and dispersive effects during propagation.

Findings

Few-cycle pulses survive large nonlinear increases.

Spatio-temporal distortions self-heal upon refocusing.

Robustness of filamentation sources explained by self-healing.

Abstract

We numerically investigate the propagation of a self-compressed optical filament through a gas-glass-gas interface. Few-cycle light pulses survive a sudden and short order-of-magnitude increase of nonlinearity and dispersion, even when all conservative estimates predict temporal spreading or spatial breakup. Spatio-temporal distortions are shown to self-heal upon further propagation when the pulse refocuses in the second gas. This self-healing mechanism has important implications for pulse compression techniques handled by filamentation and explains the robustness of such sources.