Plasma waveguide array induced by filament interaction

Opt Lett. 2009 Dec 15;34(24):3806-8. doi: 10.1364/OL.34.003806.

Abstract

We demonstrate that interference-assisted coalescence of two noncollinearly overlapped filaments creates a wavelength-scale periodic plasma density modulation to guide the input pulses equivalently as a photonic crystal plasma waveguide. The periodic self-channeling is evidenced by the direct observation of the filament coalescence, which reveals wavelength-scale spatial widths and periodicity dependent on the crossing angles and intensity ratios between the incident filaments.