空气激光: 面向大气遥感的高分辨光谱技术

Air-lasing is a cavityless coherent radiation generated in free space from air constituents as gain medium, featuring high collimation, high coherence, and high intensity. Benefited from the long-range filamentation of high-power ultrashort laser pulses propagating in air, the air-lasing can be induced remotely, providing an ideal light source for atmospheric remote sensing and chemical species-resolved detection. Owing to the coherent atomic/molecular excitation process accompanied with the generation of air laser, remote sensing based on air-lasing has high spectral resolution and high detection sensitivity, which recently proved to be a powerful tool for important applications such as in trace molecule detection, greenhouse gas monitoring and industrial pollutant detection. In this short review, the physical mechanism of air lasing is briefly introduced, and various applications of air laser remote sensing are reviewed emphatically, and the future research is prospected.