Abstract:
We report experimental and theoretical investigations of visible supercontinuum generation in the formation of light bullets in a filament produced by IR pulses. In the filamentation of a 1700–2200 nm pulse in fused silica, bright tracks are recorded resulting from the recombination glow of carriers in the laser plasma produced by a sequence of light bullets and from the scattering in silica of the visible supercontinuum generated by the light bullets. It is found that the formation of a light bullet is attended with an outburst of a certain portion of supercontinuum energy in the visible range. The energy outburst is the same for all bullets in the sequence and becomes smaller with increasing pulse wavelength.