Second harmonic generation in centrosymmetric gas with spatiotemporally focused intense femtosecond laser pulses.

We demonstrate unexpectedly strong second harmonic generation (SHG) in argon gas by use of spatio-temporally focused (SF) femtosecond laser pulses. The resulting SHG by the SF scheme at a 75 cm distance shows a significantly enhanced efficiency than that achieved with conventional focusing schemes, which offers a new promising possibility for standoff applications. Our theoretical calculations reasonably reproduce the experimental observations, which indicate that the observed SHG mainly originates from the gradient of non-uniform plasma dynamically controlled by the SF laser field.