Self-focusing has been an area of active scientific investigation for nearly 50 years. This book presents a comprehensive treatment of this topic and reviews both theoretical and experimental investigations of self-focusing. This book should be of interest to scientists and engineers working with lasers and their applications. From a practical point of view, self-focusing effects impose a limit on the power that can be transmitted through a material medium. Self-focusing also can reduce the threshold for the occurrence of other nonlinear optical processes. Self-focusing often leads to damage in optical materials and is a limiting factor in the design of high-power laser systems. But it can be harnessed for the design of useful devices such as optical power limiters and switches. At a formal level, the equations for self-focusing are equivalent to those describing Bose-Einstein condensates and certain aspects of plasma physics and hydrodynamics. There is thus a unifying theme between nonlinear optics and these other disciplines. One of the goals of this book is to connect the extensive early literature on self-focusing, filament-ation, self-trapping, and collapse with more recent studies aimed at issues such as self-focusing of fs pulses, white light generation, and the generation of filaments in air with lengths of more than 10 km. It also describes some modern advances in self-focusing theory including the influence of beam nonparaxiality on self-focusing collapse. This book consists of 24 chapters. Among them are three reprinted key landmark articles published earlier. It also contains the first publication of the 1964 paper that describes the first laboratory observation of self-focusing phenomena with photographic evidence.

Table of Contents:
Self-focusing in the Past.- Self-Focusing and Filaments of Light: Past and Present.- Notes on Early Self-Focusing Papers.- Optical Self-Focusing: Stationary Beams and Femtosecond Pulses.- Self-Focusing of Optical Beams.- Multi-Focus Structure and Moving Nonlinear Foci: Adequate Models of Self-Focusing of Laser Beams in Nonlinear Media.- Small-Scale Self-focusing.- Wave Collapse in Nonlinear Optics.- Beam Shaping and Suppression of Self-focusing in High-Peak-Power Nd:Glass Laser Systems.- Self-focusing, Conical Emission, and Other Self-action Effects in Atomic Vapors.- Periodic Filamentation and Supercontinuum Interference.- Reprints of Papers from the Past.- Self-focusing in the Past.- Self-focusing and Filamentation of Femtosecond Pulses in Air and Condensed Matter: Simulations and Experiments.- Self-organized Propagation of Femtosecond Laser Filamentation in Air.- The Physics of Intense Femtosecond Laser Filamentation.- Self-focusing and Filamentation of Powerful Femtosecond Laser Pulses.- Spatial and Temporal Dynamics of Collapsing Ultrashort Laser Pulses.- Some Modern Aspects of Self-focusing Theory.- X-Waves in Self-Focusing of Ultra-Short Pulses.- On the Role of Conical Waves in Self-focusing and Filamentation of Femtosecond Pulses with Nonlinear Losses.- Self-focusing and Self-defocusing of Femtosecond Pulses with Cascaded Quadratic Nonlinearities.- Effective Parameters of High-Power Laser Femtosecond Radiation at Self-focusing in Gas and Aerosol Media.- Diffraction-Induced High-Order Modes of the (2 + 1)D Nonparaxial Nonlinear Schrödinger Equation.- Self-Focusing and Solitons in Photorefractive Media.- Measuring Nonlinear Refraction and Its Dispersion.