Loss of polarization of elliptically polarized collapsing beams
| Autor: | Amir Sagiv, Alexander L. Gaeta, Adi Ditkowski, Gadi Fibich, Xiaohui Gao, Gauri Patwardhan, Jared S. Ginsberg, Avik Dutt |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Physical Review A. 99 |
| ISSN: | 2469-9934 2469-9926 |
| DOI: | 10.1103/physreva.99.033824 |
| Popis: | We show theoretically and demonstrate experimentally that collapsing elliptically polarized laser beams experience a nonlinear ellipse rotation that is highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the input power. For arbitrarily small fluctuations in the input power and after a sufficiently large propagation distance, the polarization angle becomes uniformly distributed in $[0,2\ensuremath{\pi}]$ from shot to shot. We term this phenomenon loss of polarization. We perform experiments in fused-silica glass, nitrogen gas, and water and observe a significant increase in the fluctuations of the output polarization angle for elliptically polarized femtosecond pulses as the power is increased beyond the critical power for self-focusing. We also show numerically and confirm experimentally that this effect is more prominent in the anomalous group-velocity dispersion (GVD) regime compared to the normal-GVD regime due to the extended lengths of the filaments for the former. Such effects could play an important role in intense-field light-matter interactions in which elliptically polarized pulses are utilized. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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