Extreme carrier shocking of intense long-wavelength pulses

We predict a paradigm shift in the nonlinear physics associated with ultrashort long-wavelength pulse propagation in gaseous and condensed media. Optical carrier shock formation, which profoundly modifies the underlying optical wave form, emerges prior to the onset of the well-known self-focusing collapse singularity. The canonical description of pulse propagation in this regime, where all nonlinear envelope descriptions fail, is identified as the full field carrier resolved modified Kadomtsev-Petviashili (MKP) equation.