Arrest of self-focusing collapse in femtosecond air filaments: higher order Kerr or plasma defocusing?

Abstract

Experimentally measured conical emission rings on the blue side of the filament supercontinuum of a 800 nm 50 fs pulse in air are reproduced in simulations with plasma and the third-order Kerr as the nonlinear terms. This agreement indicates plasma as the dominant mechanism arresting the self-focusing collapse. The higher order Kerr terms with the recently measured coefficients stop the collapse at a lower intensity than the plasma does and lead to the spherical angle-wavelength spectrum without blueshifted rings.