Multi-terawatt 10 μm pulse atmospheric delivery over multiple Rayleigh ranges

We predict that long wavelength self-trapped multi-terawatt pulses can be sustained over multiple kilometers in the atmosphere. Unlike filaments, these pulses exhibit low loss propagation and retain most of their launch power at range. A novel mechanism involving an aggregation of weakly linear and nonlinear cumulative optical responses is shown to be responsible and is dominated by an ultrafast dynamical lensing resulting from a field intensity driven many-body Coulomb mediated free electron polarization associated with spatially separated species in the gas. An initial few picosecond pulse can compress down to 140 fs over multiple kilometers.