The threshold of a laser-induced breakdown of air is determined experimentally and theoretically. We find that the ionization of air has two steps: the first step is a multi-photon ionization process, which provides enough “seed electrons” to initiate the next step, and the second one is predominated by cascade ionization, which continues to produce free electrons geometrically until the critical free-electron density for breakdown is reached. So a two-step model based on the Morgan ionization m
