Physics Commons^™

Simulation Of Ultrashort Laser Pulse Propagation And Plasma Generation In Nonlinear Media. Dissertation, Jeremy Gulley

Jeremy R. Gulley

In this dissertation, a modified nonlinear Schrödinger equation is derived, which describes the propagation of ultrashort laser pulses through nonlinear materials in which plasma generation and laser-induced damage can occur. Differences between this model and models currently used in the literature are investigated and analyzed by numerical simulations. Ultrafast laser-induced material modification is investigated using this method by simulating the propagation of fully 3+1D (3 spatial plus 1 time dimension) laser pulses, which are numerically constructed from experimentally measured beam profiles and pulse shape data. The latest of these investigations reveals that standard rate-equation models for the free-electron plasma generation …