Ultrasmall bullets of light—focusing few-cycle light pulses to the diffraction limit

Adaptive Generation and Diagnostics of Linear Few-Cycle Light Bullets

Recently we introduced the class of highly localized wavepackets (HLWs) as a generalization of optical Bessel-like needle beams. Here we report on the progress in this field. In contrast to pulsed Bessel beams and Airy beams, ultrashort-pulsed HLWs propagate with high stability in both spatial and temporal domain, are nearly paraxial (supercollimated), have fringe-less spatial profiles and thus...

Contrast Improvement of Relativistic Few-Cycle Light Pulses

Laser-plasma interaction has been a widespread and popular field of research since the birth of the laser. It involves numerous interesting phenomena such as inertial confinement fusion; generation and acceleration of electron, positron, neutron, proton and ion particle beams; source of electro-magnetic radiation in the IR, visible, UV and x-ray range, just to mention some important application...

Light bullets by synthetic diffraction-dispersion matching.

We put forward a new approach to generate stable, fully three-dimensional light bullets, which is based on the matching of the intrinsic material dispersion with a suitable effective diffraction. The matching is achieved in adequate waveguide arrays whose refractive index is periodically modulated along the direction of light propagation. We show that by using nonconventional, out-of-phase long...

Controlling H- detachment with few-cycle pulses

Signatures of attosecond electron tunneling dynamics in the evolution of intense few-cycle light pulses

The sensitivity of electron tunneling to the phase of an ionizing light field is shown to manifest itself in detectable features in the spectral and temporal evolution of intense few-cycle light pulses in an ionizing medium. An ultrafast buildup of electron density in the regime of tunneling ionization gives rise to a modulation of a few-cycle field wave form and enhances the short-wavelength p...