Physics Commons^™

Plasma Generation By Ultrashort Multi-Chromatic Pulses During Nonlinear Propagation, Jeremy R. Gulley, Jiexi Liao, Thomas E. Lanier

Faculty and Research Publications

The use of femtosecond lasers in industrial, biomedical, and defense related applications during the last 15 years has necessitated a detailed understanding of pulse propagation coupled with ultrafast laser-material interactions. Current models of ultrashort pulse propagation in solids describe the pulse evolution of fields with broad spectra and are typically coupled to models of ionization and laser-plasma interaction that assume monochromatic laser fields. In this work we address some of the errors introduced by combining these inconsistent descriptions. In particular, we show that recently published experiments and simulations demonstrate how this contradiction can produce order-of-magnitude errors in calculating the ionization …