Measurements of the High Field Optical Nonlinearity and Electron Density in Gases: Application to Filamentation Experiments

We discuss recent experiments and calculations of the high-intensity optical nonlinearity in gases. Spectral interferometry measurements of the nonlinear optical response of air constituents to laser intensities near the ionization threshold are performed. A calculation of the phase shift caused by a plasma grating created by interference between the pump and probe beams in a transient birefringence measurement suggests that experimental techniques measuring cross phase modulation of a probe pulse by a strong pump pulse are unreliable for studying the optical nonlinearity when the pump and probe pulses are of the same wavelength. An interferometric measurement of the electron density in a filament is also performed. The peak elec-tron density measured is consistent with a model that includes plasma defocusing, but not higher-order Kerr terms. These tech-niques promise to improve the quantitative understanding of nonlinear optics near the ionization threshold and filamentation.