摘要In this paper we report a recent study on the beam self-cleaning behavior occurred during the ultrashort laser pulse filamentation process. The propagation of a Gaussian beam with distorted beam profile is numerically simulated based on the nonlinear wave equation. Our results demonstrate that when the power is not too high so that multiple filaments are not yet induced, the intensity perturbation contained in the initial beam profile could be treated as high order spatial modes superpositioning on a fundamental mode. Then the self-focusing of the laser beam acts as a spatial filter. It focuses the fundamental mode toward the propagation axis, and produces a fundamental mode profile at the self-focus. While the strong diffraction of higher order modes could not be counteracted by the self-focusing. Therefore their propagation is mainly governed by the divergence without destroying the high profile quality at the self-focal region. These lead to the observation of beam profile self-cleaning behavior.