Eur. Phys. J. D (2015) 69: 197
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2015-60253-x

Regular Article

The life cycle of infrared ultra-short high intensity laser pulses in air

Institute of Electromagnetics, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu 610031, P.R. China

^a e-mail: wl@swjtu.edu.cn

Received: 25 April 2015
Received in final form: 12 June 2015
Published online: 6 August 2015

Abstract

The life cycle of ultra-short high intensity laser pulses propagation in air is studied. As the controversial of the high-order Kerr indices measured by Loriot et al. [Opt. Express 18, 3011 (2010)], we focus on two models which are high-order Kerr effect included and not included. Two factors are mainly analyzed, group-velocity-dispersion and the energy evolution of the pulse. It is found that the group-velocity-dispersion can not be simply ignored even though the pulse’s duration is as long as several hundreds femtoseconds. The energy loss due to the multi-photon-absorption is very small, and it may hardly change the propagation length of the pulse. Another contribution of this work is to introduce a probability quantity, which may be useful in validating the positive and negative alternating of the Kerr and high-order Kerr indices.