OPTICAL WAVEPACKETS (OPTICAL BULLETS): A NEW DIFFRACTION FREE FORM OF LIGHT TRAVEL

This is the final report of a three-year, Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). We conducted studies of the propagation of self-confined packets of light or ''Optical Bullets'' through air. These packets are self-forming and require no active optics. At the present time, theoretical explanations provide an incomplete description of this process. Generation of these pulses requires a light source of sufficient energy and with a short enough pulse-width that the intensity exceeds a critical wavelength dependent value. We used a Ti:Sapphire based system to generate the pulses and we observed pulse-splitting and chirp-dependent control of the formation of these filaments. In addition, we developed a novel algorithm for extracting the phase and electric field of these pulses using Frequency Resolved Optical Gating coupled to genetic algorithms for pulse retrieval