Airy beam self-focusing in a photorefractive medium

Abstract

The unique bending and shape-preserving properties of optical Airy beams offer a large range of applications in for example beam routing, optical waveguiding, particle manipulation and plasmonics. In these applications and others, the Airy beam may experience nonlinear light-matter interactions which in turn modify the Airy beam properties and propagation. A well-known example is light self-focusing that leads to the formation of spatial soliton. Here, we unveil experimentally the self-focusing properties of a 1D-Airy beam in a photorefractive crystal under focusing conditions. The transient evolution involves both self-bending and acceleration of the initially launched Airy beam due to the onset of an off-shooting soliton and the resulting nonlocal refractive index perturbation. Both the transient and stationary self-focusing properties can be tuned by varying the bias electric field, the injected Airy beam power and the background illumination.

Counterpropagating interactions of self-focusing Airy beams

“…While a weak focusing or a defocusing nonlinearity enable the Airy beam to self-trap and to preserve the Airy properties over a larger distance 6 , it has been demonstrated that a strong focusing nonlinearity leads to a break-down of the Airy beam into what has been called an off-shooting soliton (OSS) and a remaining accelerating structure 7 – 9 . Recently we have experimentally demonstrated the self-focusing properties of a 1D-Airy beam in a nonlinear photorefractive crystal 10 and confirm the true solitonic property of the resulting OSS 11 .…”

“…As detailed in ref. 10 , a single propagating Airy beam under strong nonlinear focusing condition turns into a solitonic beam (off-shooting soliton or OSS) at the transverse zero-deflection position [ A 1 0 in Fig. 2(a) ], that coexists with an accelerating beam structure [ A 1 1 at z = L in Fig.…”

Light-induced interconnects using nonlinear Airy beam interactions

“…where F 0 (respectively B 0 ) is the wave amplitude, Ai is the Airy function, a the truncation parameter of the Airy beam. To simulate the behavior of the propagation of the antisymmetric Airy beams, we use the same theoretical model as in [10,11,[22][23][24]. The nonlinear propagation of the two incoherent counter-propagating beams can be expressed as follows:…”

“…This self-healing, shape-preserving, accelerating beam has multiple applications from manipulating microparticles [3] and plasma channel generation [4] to all-optical routing [5], or light-sheet microscopy [6]. Recently, the self trapping character of Airy beams in biased nonlinear media has suggested interesting dynamics such as soliton-like behaviors [7][8][9][10][11]. Co-propagating Airy beams and their interactions have been studied in different medias ranging from nematic liquid crystals [12] to photonic lattices [13] or threewave systems [14].…”

“…Similarly to studies with two co-propagating Airy beams, two counter-propagating Airy beams in a saturable nonlinear media will shed OSSs given enough nonlinearity strength [22], furthermore the OSSs tend to be attracted by the lobes of the counter-propagating Airy beam [23]. However, by contrast to studies with two copropagating Airy beams, a counter-propagating configuration combined with the large transverse dimension of the Airy shape and their curved trajectory allow several interaction schemes where one or several lobes of the counter-propagating beams can overlap [10,22,23]. The interaction of such counter-propagating Airy beams introduce new dynamics and open new interesting fields for optical interconnections.…”