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 numerically illustrate this physics with pulse trains where prepulses 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 wave packet with an improved spatiotemporal profile downstream.