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Loss of Polarization in Collapsing Beams
- Source :
- Phys. Rev. A 99, 033824 (2019)
- Publication Year :
- 2018
-
Abstract
- We show theoretically and demonstrate experimentally that collapsing elliptically-polarized laser beams experience a nonlinear ellipse rotation that is highly sensitive to small fluctuations in the input power. For arbitrarily small fluctuations in the input power and after a sufficiently large propagation distance, the polarization angle becomes uniformly distributed in [0, 2$\pi$] from shot-to-shot. We term this novel phenomenon 'loss of polarization'. We perform experiments in fused-silica glass, nitrogen gas and water, and observe a significant increase in the fluctuations of the output polarization angle for elliptically-polarized femtosecond pulses as the power is increased beyond the critical power for self-focusing. We also show numerically and confirm experimentally that this effect is more prominent in the anomalous group-velocity dispersion (GVD) regime compared to the normal-GVD regime due to the extended lengths of the filaments for the former. Such effects could play an important role in intense-field light-matter interactions in which elliptically-polarized pulses are utilized.<br />Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures
- Subjects :
- Physics - Optics
Subjects
Details
- Database :
- arXiv
- Journal :
- Phys. Rev. A 99, 033824 (2019)
- Publication Type :
- Report
- Accession number :
- edsarx.1808.07019
- Document Type :
- Working Paper
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.99.033824