Femtosecond laser filamentation is a complex nonlinear optical phenomenon. It may be described as the propagation of a phenomenologically non-diffracting beam when the pulse duration becomes sufficiently shorter than the characteristic interaction time scales with matter. The induction of such light filaments may lead to several interesting effects (among others, compression of ultrashort pulses, dramatic spectral broadening termed supercontinuum and generation of broadband ultrashort terahertz pulses), which renders it appealing for potential applications. Even though femtosecond laser filamentation has been extensively studied over the past two decades, the observation of this phenomenon in plasmonic colloidal solutions is quite recent; The objective of this project is to unravel the principal physical mechanisms involved during ultrashort pulse propagation in plasmonic colloids and engineer filamentation nonlinear optics by exploiting the tunable third order optical properties of such metamaterials.
