Optical guiding in 50-meter-scale air waveguides

The distant projection of high peak and average power laser beams in the atmosphere is a longstanding goal with a wide range of applications. Our early proof-of-principle experiments [Phys. Rev. X 4, 011027 (2014)] presented one solution to this problem, employing the energy deposition of femtosecond filaments in air to sculpt millisecond lifetime sub-meter length air waveguides. Here, we demonstrate air waveguiding at the 50 meter scale, 60X longer, making many practical applications now possible. We employ a new method for filament energy deposition: multi-filamentation of Laguerre-Gaussian LG01 "donut" modes. We first investigate the detailed physics of this scheme over a shorter 8 m in-lab propagation range corresponding to ~13 Rayleigh lengths of the guided pulse. We then use these results to demonstrate optical guiding over ~45 m in the hallway adjacent to the lab, corresponding to ~70 Rayleigh lengths. Injection of a continuous wave probe beam into these waveguides demonstrates very long lifetimes of tens of milliseconds.

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