High‐power laser sources are widely used in industrial precision processing and act as a
new platform for strong‐field physics research using peak power over petawatt. This review …

Lightning discharges between charged clouds and the Earth's surface are responsible for
considerable damages and casualties. It is therefore important to develop better protection …

We study the filamentation in air of multi-millijoule optical vortices and compare them with
the classical filamentation regime. The femtosecond vortex beam generates multiple plasma …

We describe a new approach for driving GeV-scale plasma accelerators with long laser
pulses. We show that the temporal phase of a long, high-energy driving laser pulse can be …

The recent development of high average, high peak power lasers has revived the effort of
using lasers as a potential tool to influence natural lightning. Although impressive, the …

In the framework of the Laser Lightning Rod project, whose aim is to show that laser-induced
filaments can guide lightning discharges over considerable distances, we study over a …

A nonlinear self-focusing material can amplify random small-amplitude phase modulations
present in an optical beam, leading to the formation of amplitude singularities commonly …

We study the influence of the laser repetition rate on the generation of low-density channels
of air left in the path of femtosecond laser filament. At high repetition rates, we observe the …

Cumulative effects are crucial for applications of laser filaments, such as for the remote
transfer of energy and the control of electric discharges. Up to now, studies of cumulative …

Currently, laser systems based on active elements doped with Yb3+ with simultaneously
high pulse repetition rates and high peak power are in demand for many applications. High …