Control of the filament dynamics of 10 μm pulses via designer pulse trains

Atmospheric low-loss delivery of high energy long wavelength picosecond duration pulses over multiple Rayleigh ranges will be dominated by the recently identified many-body coherent excitation-induced dephasing and avalanche based memory effects. We illustrate this novel physics with pulse trains where pre-pulses gradually accumulate plasma preparing the medium for the main high power pulse. The control over the nonlinear dynamics makes it possible to effectively avoid pulse splitting in the first few hundred meters, and deliver a wavepacket with improved spatio-temporal profile downstream.