Bidirectional cascaded superfluorescent lasing in air enabled by resonant third harmonic photon exchange from nitrogen to argon
Abstract
Cavity-free lasing in atmospheric air has stimulated intense research towards fundamental understanding of underlying physical mechanisms. In this Letter, we identify a new mechanism -- third harmonic photon mediated resonant energy transfer pathway leading to population inversion in argon via initial three-photon excitation of nitrogen molecules irradiated by intense 261 nm pulses -- that enables bidirectional two-color cascaded lasing in atmospheric air. By making pump-probe measurements, we conclusively show that such cascaded lasing results from superfluorescence (SF) rather than amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). Such cascaded lasing with the capability of producing bidirectional multicolor coherent pulses opens additional possibilities for remote sensing applications.
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Cite
@article{arxiv.2405.04089,
title = {Bidirectional cascaded superfluorescent lasing in air enabled by resonant third harmonic photon exchange from nitrogen to argon},
author = {Zan Nie and Noa Nambu and Kenneth A. Marsh and Daniel Matteo and C. Kumar Patel and Chaojie Zhang and Yipeng Wu and Stefanos Carlström and Felipe Morales and Serguei Patchkovskii and Olga Smirnova and Misha Ivanov and Chan Joshi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.04089},
year = {2024}
}
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4 figures