Investigating the Threshold Conditions of Air Breakdown with Mode-Locked Q-Switched Laser Pulses, and the Temporal Dynamics of Induced Plasma with Self-Scattering Phenomenon

A Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with mode-locked modulations is utilized to explore the laser-induced air breakdown. The various modulation depths of the mode-locking within the Q-switched pulse can be utilized to investigate the threshold conditions. With the GHz high-speed detectors to accurately measure the temporal pulse shape pulse by pulse, it is verified that the air breakdown threshold is crucially determined by the peak-power density instead of the energy density from the statistic results, especially for mode-locked Q-switched lasers. The stability of the system for laser-induced breakdown can be evaluated by threshold width through fitting the statistical result. Otherwise, by measuring the temporal characteristics of the excitation pulse and the induced plasma, it is further found that the plasma radiation displays a few-nanoseconds time delay to the excitation pulse and shows a decaying tail to be 10 times longer than the plasma build-up time. Moreover, the incident laser pulse is observed to be self-scattered by the air breakdown, and a rapidly modulated scattering rate is found with a slight delay time to the excitation mode-locked subpulse modulations.