Time-resolved study of the lasing emission from high vibrational levels of N2^+ pumped with circularly polarized femtosecond pulses

We experimentally investigated the forward 353.8 nm radiation from plasma filaments in pure nitrogen gas pumped by intense circularly polarized 800 nm femtosecond laser pulses.This emission line corresponds to the B^2Σu^+(u'=4)-X^2Σg^+(u=3)transition of nitrogen ions.In the presence of an external seeding pulse,the 353.8 nm signal was amplified by 3 orders of magnitude.Thanks to the much enhanced intensity,we performed time-resolved measurement of the amplified 353.8 nm emission based on the sum-frequency generation technique.It was revealed that the built-up time and duration of these emissions are both inversely proportional to the gas pressure,while the radiation peak power grows up nearly quadratically with pressure,indicating that the 353.8 nm radiation is of the nature of superradiance.