ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: HIGH FIELD OPTICAL NONLINEARITIES IN GASES

Optical femtosecond self-channeling in gases, also called femtosecond filamentation, has become an important area of research in high field nonlinear optics. Filamentation occurs when laser light self-focuses in a gas owing to self-induced nonlinearity, and then defocuses in the plasma generated by the self-focused beam. The result of this process repeating itself multiple times is an extended region of plasma formation. Filamentation studies have been motivated by the extremely broad range of applications, especially in air, including pulse compression, supercontinuum generation, broadband high power terahertz pulse generation, discharge triggering and guiding, and remote sensing. Despite the worldwide work in filamentation, the fundamental gas nonlinearities governing self-focusing had never been directly measured in the range of laser intensity up to and including the ionization threshold. This dissertation presents the first such measurements. We absolutely measured the temporal refractive index change of O2, N2, Ar, H2, D2 and N2O caused by high-field ultrashort optical pulses with single-shot supercontinuum spectral interferometry, cleanly separating for the first time the instantaneous electronic and delayed rotational nonlinear response in diatomic gases