Study of ambient air ionization with femtosecond laser pulses

The laser induced ionization of ambient air is studied experimentally with laser pulses whose durations range from 50 fs up to 10 ps at 800 nm. It is found that the minimum pulse energy for detectable air ionization follows the scaling law of epsilon(th) proportional to t(p)(x), with 0.23 < x < 0.5, and x tends to rise for longer pulses within the range of 50 fs - 500 fs. For laser pulses from 0.7 ps to 10 ps, however, x is approximately equal to 0.8. The dependence of the critical intensity for air ionization on the beam spot size is also examined with a variety of focused laser beam spot sizes in the experiments.