Temporal stitching in burst-mode filamentation

Abstract

The creation of single optical filaments in air is bound by constraints on laser power, divergence, wavelength, pulse duration, and atmospheric parameters. The consequential characteristics of the filaments produced limit some potential applications, particularly those related to a filament’s spatial and temporal extent. Here, we demonstrate, for the first time, the temporal concatenation or stitching of up to 32 filaments, each separated by times typically ∼0.5ns, forming a single stream of coaxial filamenting laser pulses.