Thermal self-broadening of strong light pulses in the course of their propagation in an absorbing aerosol

A theoretical investigation is made of the self-broadening of spatially bounded pulses of high-intensity light in a statistically homogeneous polydisperse medium. A solution is obtained for a transient temperature distribution in a medium with discrete heat-evolution centers. Stochastic equations are obtained for the description of the behavior of the dimensionless width of a light beam and of the weighted-mean radius of curvature of the phase front. The solutions are solved on a computer by the random sampling method. This method gives the mathematical expectation and the variance of the required quantities which are regarded as arithmetic means of a finite number of random realizations.