Carrier field shock formation of long-wavelength femtosecond pulses in single-crystal diamond and air

We numerically demonstrate the formation of carrier field shocks in single-crystal diamond and air for a wide variety of input conditions using two different electric field propagation models. We investigate the impact of numerous physical effects on the carrier wave shock. It is shown that, in many cases, a field shock is essentially unavoidable and therefore extremely important in the propagation of intense long-wavelength pulses in weakly dispersive nonlinear media. We found that single-crystal diamond is the ideal nonlinear medium for carrier wave shock formation using mid-IR laser pulses carrying moderate energies.