Simultaneous generation of controllable double white
light lasers by focusing an intense femtosecond
laser pulse in air
Yaoxiang Liu (刘尧香)
1,2,3
, Tie-Jun Wang (王铁军)
2,3,
*, Na Chen (陈 娜)
2,3
,
Hao Guo (郭 豪)
2,3
, Haiyi Sun (孙海轶)
2,3
, Lu Zhang (张 璐)
4
, Zheng Qi (齐 征)
4
,
Yuxin Leng (冷雨欣)
2,3
, Zhanshan Wang (王占山)
1
, and Ruxin Li (李儒新)
2,3
1
MOE Key Laboratory of Advanced Micro-structured Materials, Institute of Precision Optical Engineering,
School of Physics Science and Engineering, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
2
State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics and CAS Center for Excellence in Ultra-intense Laser Science,
Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
3
Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences,
Beijing 100049, China
4
Science and Technology on Space Physics Laboratory, Beijing 100076, China
*Corresponding author: tiejunwang@siom.ac.cn
Received July 20, 2020; accepted August 28, 2020; posted online October 14, 2020
We report on a simultaneous generation of double white light lasers through filamentation by focusing a femto-
second laser pulse. The appearance of the two white light lasers can be controlled by tilting the focusing lens. The
spectral bandwidth and the pulse energy of the double white light lasers were controlled by tuning laser fila-
menting pulse energy and polarization. Two white light lasers with pulse energies of 1.54 mJ and 1.84 mJ,
respectively, were generated with the pump laser energy of 7.43 mJ. Besides being beneficial in understanding
the multiple white light lasers generation process through multiple filamentation and its control, the results are
also valuable for white light laser-based applications.
Keywords: filamentation; white light laser; polarization.
doi: 10.3788/COL202018.121402.
Propagation of an ultrashort intense pulse laser beam in
transparent media is one of the research frontiers in non-
linear optics due to the complex physics of nonlinear ef-
fects and its wide range of applications
[1–4]
. One of the
remarkable applications is the generation of supercontin-
uum (SC) from filamentation, which was firstly, to the
best of our knowledge, investigated in 1986
[5]
. The spec-
trum of Ti:sapphire laser-based white light or SC spans
from the ultraviolet to the infrared wavelength. Moreover,
the white light produced by the ultrashort intense laser
pulse through filamentation has been proved to be spa-
tially and temporally coherent
[6,7]
, which is more critical
to SC for ultrafast spectroscopy applications to achieve
higher accuracy, efficiency, and speed with lower cost. The
filament-based coherent white light laser source finds ex-
tensive applications in biomedical imaging
[8]
, molecular
fingerprint spectroscopy
[9]
, optical coherence tomogra-
phy
[10]
, tunable ultrafast pulse generation
[11]
, few-cycle fem-
tosecond pulses compression
[12]
, LIDAR for atmospheric
remote sensing
[13–15]
, etc. Kerr and plasma-nonlinearities-
based self-phase modulation (SPM), self-steepening, and
four wave mixing are the basic mechanisms proposed
for broadband SC generation
[16,17]
. The evolutions of SC
generation through filamentation have been investigated
under the conditions of free propagation, loose and tight
focusing
[18–21]
, and different initial laser polarizations
[19,22]
.
The tilting lens has been used to control filament prop-
erties such as the number, cross pattern, and structure
through introducing aberration by focusing femtosecond
laser pulses
[23–26]
. Meanwhile, formation of SCs was also
studied
[25,27,28]
. Compared with these works, in our work,
we make use of the well investigated astigmatism control
technique simply by tilting the focal lens to control the
appearance of the double white light lasers. The appear-
ance of the two white light lasers is related to the tilting-
lens-controlled filaments. The most important is that
these two white light lasers can be controlled by pump la-
ser polarization . Spectral and energy measurements of
each white light laser were performed separately when
changing the laser polarization. Our results reveal that
the two white light lasers can be controlled by manipulat-
ing the laser intensity inside the filaments through pump
laser energy and polarization.
A laser pulse generated from a Ti:sapphire laser pulse
amplifier was focused by an f ¼ 50 cm lens to create fila-
ments in air [Fig.
1(a)]. The beam diameter is of 12 mm
with a centra l wavelength at 800 nm, repetition rate of
1 kHz, and pulse duration of 32 fs. A zero-order quarter
waveplate (QWP) was used to tune the polarization of
the laser pulse for filamentation. Laser polarization
changed from linear polarization (LP) to circle polariza-
tion (CP) when the QWP angle was rotated from 0 deg
COL 18 (12), 121402(2020) CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS December 2020
1671-7694/2020/121402(5) 121402-1 © 2020 Chinese Optics Letters