We have experimentally demonstrated that because of intensity clamping, when the laser peak power is higher than the critical power for self-focusing, further increase of the laser power cannot result in corresponding increase of the laser ablation rate of a metallic sample placed in gases. The ablation rate will finally approach a stabilized value. Also, the experimental technique implemented in our work could be potentially used to measure the self-focusing critical power and the nonlinear refractive index.

We report, for the first time, the experimental result and its analysis of synthesizing a series of simulating 2-D tomograms into a 3-D monochromatic image. Our result shows clearly the advantage in monochromaticity of a vertical area-partition (VAP) approach over a horizontal areapartition (HAP) approach during the final white-light reconstruction. This monochromaticity will ensure a 3-D image synthesis without any distortion in gray level or positional recovery.