Optical terahertz bullets

Optical generation of broadband terahertz radiation in a system of resonant anisotropic molecules with a permanent dipole moment has been investigated taking into account the transverse dynamics of pulses. It has been shown that, if the carrier frequency of a femtosecond optical signal is higher than the eigenfrequency of a selected molecular transition by such a value that the spectrum of the pulse, owing to its finite length, covers the resonance transition, the generation occurs in the filamentation regime followed by transformation of the filaments into stable optical terahertz bullets localized in all directions. In this case, the energy generation efficiency can be as high as ∼10−3.