Extending optical filaments using auxiliary dress beams

Dressed optical filaments offer a way to greatly protract an optical filament's natural length while at the same time mitigating nonlinear losses and unwanted multifilamentation effects. In this article, we first theoretically reexamine the quasi-linear propagation dynamics of a standard Gaussian-ring wavefront and then proceed to explore several optical dress beam arrangements of equal-energy. The purpose of this study is to numerically simulate configurations which more economically utilize the finite amount of energy available for filament prolongation. In general, we find that parameters such as beam width and inward radial chirp, when adjusted in unison, play an important role in extending a filament whereas the spatial distribution of power in the optical dress only affects the characteristic intensity fluctuations seen during refocusing cycles.