title: Post-filament self-trapping of ultrashort laser pulses.
abstract: Laser filamentation is understood to be self-channeling of intense ultrashort laser pulses achieved when the self-focusing because of the Kerr nonlinearity is balanced by ionization-induced defocusing. Here, we show that, right behind the ionized region of a laser filament, ultrashort laser pulses can couple into a much longer light channel, where a stable self-guiding spatial mode is sustained by the saturable self-focusing nonlinearity. In the limiting regime of negligibly low ionization, this post-filamentation beam dynamics converges to a large-scale beam self-trapping scenario known since the pioneering work on saturable self-focusing nonlinearities.
authors.forename: A V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Mitrofanov
authors.forename: A A
authors.initials: AA
authors.lastname: Voronin
authors.forename: D A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Sidorov-Biryukov
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Andriukaitis
authors.forename: T
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Flöry
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pugžlys
authors.forename: A B
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Fedotov
authors.forename: J M
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Mikhailova
authors.forename: V Ya
authors.initials: VY
authors.lastname: Panchenko
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Baltuška
authors.forename: A M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Zheltikov