Shockwave enhancement from temporally separated filaments interacting with a water droplet

Many applications of filamentation require propagation through aerosol-dense environments. The shockwave produced from a filament–droplet interaction is one mechanism of clearing a path through a dense cloud of aerosols. Here, we show an enhanced shockwave resulting from the interaction of two temporally separated filaments with a single water droplet. The expanding shockwave is imaged with an ultrafast shadowgraphy technique, and Sedov–Taylor analysis determines the energy coupled into the shockwave. For an optimal temporal spacing between the filaments of 400 ps, the shockwave energy increased by 3 times and its radius increased by 1.23 times compared to the shockwave generated by the interaction of a droplet with a single filament.