Abstract
Stimulated emissions in both backward and forward directions from a plasma filament in ambient air or pure nitrogen have been observed in recent years. In this article, we present our recent experimental results concerning the backward stimulated emission. We first demonstrate that backward stimulated emission from neutral N\(_{2}\) molecules can be effectively generated with a circularly polarized 800 nm femtosecond laser pulse in pure nitrogen. Then, we show that the presence of oxygen is detrimental to the laser gain. To further confirm the presence of population inversion, we send a counter-propagating seeding pulse into the plasma filament. This leads to an amplification of the seeding pulse by two orders of magnitude. The crucial role of pump laser polarization indicates that the inelastic collisions between the energetic electrons and the neutral N\(_{2}\) molecules are at the origin of population inversion between the relevant states.
Keywords
- Pump Pulse
- Femtosecond Laser Pulse
- Lasing Emission
- Population Inversion
- Amplify Spontaneous Emission
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Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge useful discussions with Paul Corkum of Ottawa University. The authors are also grateful to Thierry Lefrou and Aurélie Jullien of LOA for important technical help. Yi Liu acknowledges the stimulating discussion with Ya Cheng and Jinping Yao of SIOM, Huailiang Xu of Jilin University, Hongbing Jiang of Peking University, Benjamin Forestier of CILAS.
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Liu, Y. et al. (2015). Backward Lasing of Femtosecond Plasma Filaments. In: Yamanouchi, K., Roso, L., Li, R., Mathur, D., Normand, D. (eds) Progress in Ultrafast Intense Laser Science XII. Springer Series in Chemical Physics(), vol 112. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23657-5_5
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