An open challenge in the important field of femtosecond laser material processing is the controlled internal structuring of dielectric materials. Although the availability of high energy high repetition rate femtosecond lasers has led to many advances in this field, writing structures within transparent dielectrics at intensities exceeding 10¹³ W/cm² has remained difficult as it is associated with significant nonlinear spatial distortion. This letter reports the existence of a new propagation regime for femtosecond pulses at high power that overcomes this challenge, associated with the generation of a hollow uniform and intense light tube that remains propagation invariant even at intensities associated with dense plasma formation. This regime is seeded from higher order nondiffracting Bessel beams, which carry an optical vortex charge. Numerical simulations are quantitatively confirmed by experiments where a novel experimental approach allows direct imaging of the 3D fluence distribution within transparent solids. We also analyze the transitions to other propagation regimes in near and far fields. We demonstrate how the generation of plasma in this tubular geometry can lead to applications in ultrafast laser material processing in terms of single shot index writing and discuss how it opens important perspectives for material compression and filamentation guiding in atmosphere.

We report the fabrication of micro and nano-disks in single layer chemical vapor deposition graphene on glass substrate using femtosecond laser ablation with vortex Bessel beams. The fabricated graphene disks with diameters ranging from 650 nm to 4 μm were characterized by spatially resolved micro-Raman spectroscopy. The variation of ablation threshold was investigated as a function of the number of pulses showing an incubation effect. A very high degree of size control of the fabricated graphene disks is enabled using a sequence of femtosecond pulses with different vortex orders.

The generation of high-power ultrashort pulses from a passively mode-locked fiber laser is reported based on the combination of a single-polarization large-mode-area (LMA) photonic crystal fiber with a nonlinear amplifying loop mirror design. The introduction of a non-reciprocal phase shift in the loop mirror enables self-starting of the mode-locked laser, while the polarizing LMA fiber supports environmentally stable high-power operation. Mode locking in the soliton-like, stretched-pulse, and all-normal-dispersion regime is characterized. The laser generates stable pulses with up to 2 W average power at a 72 MHz repetition rate, corresponding to a single-pulse energy of 28 nJ. The output pulses are dechirped to a near transform-limited duration of 152 fs. The proposed fiber oscillator presents an alternative approach to high-power ultrafast laser sources, along with environmental stability.

We investigate experimentally and numerically the nonlinear propagation of intense Bessel–Gauss vortices in transparent solids. We show that nonlinear Bessel–Gauss vortices preserve all properties of nonlinear Bessel–Gauss beams while their helicity provides an additional control parameter for single-shot precision micro structuring of transparent solids. For sufficiently large cone angle, a stable hollow tube of intense light is formed, generating a plasma channel whose radius and density are increasing with helicity and cone angle, respectively. We assess the potential of intense Bessel vortices for applications based on the generation of hollow plasma channels.

A high pulse energy passively mode-locked fiber laser operating in the all-normal dispersion regime is demonstrated. The gain material is an Yb-doped multicore photonic crystal fiber with 18 cores in array-type geometry. Robust and self-starting mode locking is achieved using a fast semiconductor saturable absorber mirror. The laser generates $180\mathrm{nJ}$ chirped pulses at a $14.48\mathrm{MHz}$ repetition rate for an average power of $2.6\mathrm{W}$. The $1.15\mathrm{ps}$ output pulses are compressed to $690\mathrm{fs}$ outside the cavity.

We present a new type of ring-shaped filaments featured by stationary nonlinear high-order Bessel solutions to the laser beam propagation equation. Two different regimes are identified by direct numerical simulations of the nonlinear propagation of axicon focused Gaussian beams carrying helicity in a Kerr medium with multiphoton absorption: the stable nonlinear propagation regime corresponds to a slow beam reshaping into one of the stationary nonlinear high-order Bessel solutions, called nonlinear Bessel vortices. The region of existence of nonlinear Bessel vortices is found semi-analytically. The influence of the Kerr nonlinearity and nonlinear losses on the beam shape is presented. Direct numerical simulations highlight the role of attractors played by nonlinear Bessel vortices in the stable propagation regime. Large input powers or small cone angles lead to the unstable propagation regime where nonlinear Bessel vortices break up into an helical multiple filament pattern or a more irregular structure. Nonlinear Bessel vortices are shown to be sufficiently intense to generate a ring-shaped filamentary ionized channel in the medium which is foreseen as opening the way to novel applications in laser material processing of transparent dielectrics.