Extension of filament propagation in water with Bessel-Gaussian beams

We experimentally studied intense femtosecond pulse filamentation and propagation in water for Bessel-Gaussian beams with different numbers of radial modal lobes. The transverse modes of the incident Bessel-Gaussian beam were created from a Gaussian beam of a Ti:sapphire laser system by using computer generated hologram techniques. We found that filament propagation length increased with increasing number of lobes under the conditions of the same peak intensity, pulse duration, and the size of the central peak of the incident beam, suggesting that the radial modal lobes may serve as an energy reservoir for the filaments formed by the central intensity peak.