Study of nonlinear ohmic heating and ponderomotive force effects on the self-focusing and defocusing of Gaussian laser beams in collisional underdense plasmas

In the present paper, the propagation characteristics of a linearly polarized gaussian laser beam in a non-isothermal underdense collisional plasma is studied. By considering the effects of the ponderomotive force and ohmic heating of plasma electrons as the nonlinear mechanisms, the second order differential equation of the dimensionless beam width parameter has been obtained and solved at several initial ion temperatures. Furthermore, by using the nonlinear dielectric permittivity of the mentioned plasma medium in the paraxial approximation and its dependence on the propagation characteristics of the gaussian laser pulse, the perturbed electron density ne/n0e is obtained and its variation in terms of the dimensionless plasma length is analyzed at different initial ion temperatures. Our results show that the dimensionless beam width parameter is strongly influenced by the initial plasma ion temperature. It is found that, for the self-focusing regime, the plasma electron density perturbation continuously oscillates between the initial density distribution and a minimum, and for the defocusing regime, the plasma electron density perturbation continuously oscillates between the initial density distribution and a maximum.