Observation of the Terahertz Pulse Shaping Due to Intensity-Induced Additional Phase in Two-Color Filaments

As a promising terahertz (THz) source, two-color laser filamentation in gases attracts an exponential growth of interest because of the scalability of output THz pulse energy and bandwidth with input parameters. However, nonlinear effects within the laser filament on the THz pulse generation process, such as intensity-dependent refractive index change induced additional phase, have never been studied in depth. In this paper, we experimentally investigate the THz waveform evolution with input infrared pump energy from 1.75 ~ 2.75 mJ were recorded by an air biased coherent detection (ABCD) sampling setup. We observe that the magnitude ratio of the positive and negative peaks increases with the pump pulse energy, and the smooth peak at the tail gradually disappears. Based on the photocurrent model, our calculation shows that the modulation is caused by the plasma-induced additional phase that varies with incident laser intensity. Additionally, the smooth peak at the tail is considered to be caused by the fading of the residual current after the negative peak.