Concatenation of Kerr solitary waves in Ceramic YAG: application to coherent Raman imaging

A coherent concatenation of multiple Townes solitons may lead to a stable infrared and visible broadband filament in ceramic YAG polycrystal. This self-trapped soliton train helps implement self-referenced multiplex coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering imaging. Simulations and experiments are presented in this work that help enhance the understanding of the filamentation process and the concatenation of focusing-defocusing cycles in Ceramic and Crystal YAG. Simulations and experiments are presented that examine the dependence of the filamentation onset location and supercontinuum generation upon peak input power. Understanding this dependence is a necessary component of SR-M-CARS implementation.