Cylindrical shockwaves inside polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) generated simultaneously with two hemispherical shockwaves induced by a femtosecond Gaussian beam laser were investigated using an ultrafast pump–probe imaging technique. The evolutions of these three shockwaves with probe delay and incident pulse number have been systematically analyzed. The plasma intensity and filament length in the center of cylindrical shockwave both decayed with pulse number. Moreover, the self-focused filament moved downstream towards the output surface with an increased pulse number. The experimental results and mechanism illustrated that energy deposition was suppressed by a degraded nonlinear effect due to a pre-ablated structure in multi-pulse irradiation.

Taking advantage of the dispersive Fourier transformation technique, the decaying evolution processes of double-pulse mode-locking in a single-walled carbon-nanotube-based Er-doped fiber laser are observed in detail for the first time to our knowledge. The decaying dynamics of the double-pulse mode-locking state is analyzed in the spectral and temporal domains. We reveal that the two pulses in one cluster disappear either simultaneously or one by one during the decaying processes of double-pulse mode-locking states. In addition, the spectral evolution patterns of the special double-pulse states (i.e., bound states) are extremely distinct at different decline rates of the pump power.

Periodic surface structures were fabricated by irradiating lithium niobate (LN) crystals with femtosecond laser pulses at sample temperatures ranging from 28°C to 800°C. Carrier density and conductivity of the samples were increased via heating LN, which inhibited coulomb explosion to obtain a uniform periodic surface structure. The periodic surface structures cover an area of 8 mm×8 mm and have an average spacing of 174±5 nm. Meanwhile, the absorption of the processed sample is about 70% in the spectral range of 400–1000 nm, which is one order of magnitude higher than that of pure LN. Fabrication of periodic surface structures on heating LN with femtosecond laser pulses provides a possibility to generate nanogratings or nanostructures on wide-bandgap transparent crystals.

We demonstrate the suppression of soft X-ray high harmonics generated by two-color laser pulses interacting with Ne gas in a gas cell. We show that harmonic suppression can occur at the proper combination of the propagation distance and gas pressure. The physical mechanism behind is the phase mismatch between “short”-trajectory harmonics generated at the early and later times through the interplay of geometric phase, dispersion, and plasma effects. In addition, we demonstrate that the position and depth of harmonic suppression can be tuned by increasing the gas pressure. Furthermore, the suppression can be extended to other laser focusing configurations by properly scaling macroscopic parameters. Our investigation reveals a simple and novel experimental scheme purely relying on the phase mismatch for selectively controlling soft X-ray tabletop light sources without adopting the filters for applications.

A classical ensemble method is used to investigate nonsequential double ionization (NSDI) of Ar atoms irradiated by linearly polarized few-cycle laser pulses. The correlated-electron momentum distribution (CMD) exhibits a strong dependence on the carrier-envelope phase (CEP). When the pulse duration is four cycles, the CMD shows a cross-like structure, which is consistent with experimental results. The CEP dependence is more notable when the laser pulse duration is decreased to two cycles and a special L-shaped structure appears in CMD. Recollision time of returning electrons greatly depends on CEP, which plays a significant role in accounting for the appearance of this structure.

A constant elastic alloy is a widely used material with a high elastic modulus and an excellent wave velocity consistency. Different morphologies on the constant elastic alloy surface are observed through femtosecond laser irradiation. When the laser average fluence is set to 0.58 J/cm2 and 200 laser pulses, with the increasing depth of distilled water, the period of the laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) becomes shorter accordingly. The higher the ethanol concentration is, the more spot-shaped structures will be formed among the surface structures when the depth of the coverage of ethanol is 2 mm. The period of the LIPSS reaches its maximum when the concentration of ethanol is 80%.

We investigate the dynamic processes of the Nd:YAG pulse laser ablation of fused silica by ultrafast time-resolved optical diagnosis with a nanosecond time resolution. The evolution process of plasma expansion in air and shock waves propagation in the bulk are both obtained with spatial and temporal resolutions. Laser-induced damage in the bulk of fused silica with filaments and shock waves are observed. Thermoelastic wave, mechanical wave, and shock wave dependence on the laser fluence and intensity of the plasma are analyzed. The shock pressure P and temperature T calculated through the measured shock velocity D and the Hugoniot data of fused silica are measured.

We propose dynamic terahertz (THz) emission microscopy (DTEM) to visualize temporal–spatial dynamics of photoexcited carriers in electronic materials. DTEM utilizes THz pulses emitted from a sample by probe pulses irradiated after pump pulse irradiation to perform time-resolved two-dimensional mapping of the THz pulse emission, reflecting various carrier dynamics. Using this microscopy, we investigated carrier dynamics in the gap region of low-temperature-grown GaAs and semi-insulating GaAs photoconductive switches of the identical-dipole type. The observed DTEM images are well explained by the change in the electric potential distribution between the electrodes caused by the screening effect of the photoexcited electron-hole pairs.