Generation of broadband supercontinuum light by double-focusing of a femtosecond laser pulse in air

Abstract

Generation of broadband supercontinuum light has been of great interest in recent years. In this work, we investigated an interesting way for generation of broadband supercontinuum light by double-focusing of a femtosecond (fs) laser pulses in air. In this method, the fs laser pulse is focused in air and the produced supercontinuum light from the interaction of the laser pulse and air is focused again in air. In this way, we found that the spectral broadening of the supercontinuum light can be a lot more enhanced even with a relatively low laser energy of a few mJ/pulse, compared with the single-focusing method. In this paper, we present the experimental results for the broadband supercontinuum light by the double-focusing method, in addition to numerical simulation results. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.