Spatiotemporal light bullets and supercontinuum generation in β-BBO crystal with competing quadratic and cubic nonlinearities.

We experimentally study filamentation and supercontinuum generation in a birefringent medium [beta-barium borate (β-BBO) crystal] pumped by intense 90 fs, 1.8 μm laser pulses whose carrier wavelength falls in the range of anomalous group velocity dispersion of the crystal. We demonstrate that the competition between the intrinsic cubic and cascaded-quadratic nonlinearities may serve as a useful tool for controlling the self-action effects via phase matching condition. In particular, we found that spectral superbroadening of the ordinary polarization is linked to three-dimensional self-focusing and formation of self-compressed spatiotemporal light bullets that could be accessed within a certain range of either positive or negative phase mismatch. In the extraordinary polarization, we detect giant spectral shifts of the second harmonic radiation, which are attributed to a light bullet-induced self-phase matching.