Nonlinear dynamics of high-power ultrashort laser pulses: exaflop computations on a laboratory computer station and subcycle light bullets

The propagation of high-power ultrashort light pulses involves intricate nonlinear spatio-temporal dynamics where various spectral–temporal field transformation effects are strongly coupled to the beam dynamics, which, in turn, varies from the leading to the trailing edge of the pulse. Analysis of this nonlinear dynamics, accompanied by spatial instabilities, beam breakup into multiple filaments, and unique phenomena leading to the generation of extremely short optical field waveforms, is equivalent in its computational complexity to a simulation of the time evolution of a few billion-dimensional physical system. Such an analysis requires exaflops of computational operations and is usually performed on high-performance supercomputers. Here, we present methods of physical modeling and numerical analysis that allow problems of this class to be solved on a laboratory computer boosted by a cluster of graphic accelerators. Exaflop computations performed with the application of these methods reveal new unique phenomena in the spatio-temporal dynamics of high-power ultrashort laser pulses. We demonstrate that unprecedentedly short light bullets can be generated as a part of that dynamics, providing optical field localization in both space and time through a delicate balance between dispersion and nonlinearity with simultaneous suppression of diffraction-induced beam divergence due to the joint effect of Kerr and ionization nonlinearities.