Peculiarities of the spatial focusing of a high-power femtosecond laser pulse in air

The propagation of focused high-power femtosecond laser pulses in air is numerically simulated. The dependences of the effective average size of a focal spot and the maximum achievable radiation intensity in the focal beam waist on the peak power of incident radiation are studied. It is shown that in the regime of nonstationary self-action of radiation, due to photoionisation of the medium and formation of plasma, it becomes impossible to focus radiation into a spot of diffraction-limited size predicted by a linear theory.