Nonlinear dynamics of Airy-vortex 3D wave packets: emission of vortex light waves

Abstract

The dynamics of 3D Airy-vortex wave packets is studied under the action of strong self-focusing Kerr nonlinearity. Emissions of nonlinear 3D waves out of the main wave packets with the topological charges were demonstrated. Due to the conservation of the total angular momentum, charges of the emitted waves are equal to those carried by the parental light structure. The rapid collapse imposes a severe limitation on the propagation of multidimensional waves in Kerr media. However, the structure of the Airy beam carrier allows the coupling of light from the leading, most intense peak into neighboring peaks and consequently strongly postpones the collapse. The dependence of the critical input amplitude for the appearance of a fast collapse on the beam width is studied for wave packets with zero and non-zero topological charges. Wave packets carrying angular momentum are found to be much more resistant to the rapid collapse, especially those having small width.

Suppression of collapse for two-dimensional Airy beam in nonlocal nonlinear media

“…The different results are that there always exist an optical vortex in the beam center after their autofocusing, on the contrary, no vortex exists when the topological charge is m  = 0. When m  ≠ 0, the abruptly autofocusing beam carrying angular momentum, which should be conservative during propagation 27 . Thus the beams take the form of the Laguerre Gaussian beam with zero intensity distributions in the center 57 .…”

“…In nonlinear media, the beams can propagate stably when the linear diffraction and nonlinear self-focusing balance each other. If the strength of self-focusing is stronger enough than the strength of linear diffraction, the Airy beams will suffer from catastrophic collapse 24–27 .…”

“…In the future work, we would like to study the dynamics of three dimensional Airy beams 1, 27, 56, 58, 59 with large power in nonlocal media. We will show whether nonlocality could suppress their catastrophic collapse, and this will be interesting of course.…”

“…When a vortex Airy beam propagating in a nonlinear media, the locations of collapse can be controlled by the initial power, vortex order, and modulation parameters 26 . In three dimension, under the action of strong self-focusing Kerr nonlinearity, the rapid collapse of three-dimensional Airy-vortex wave packets imposes a severe limitation on the propagation of the beam 27 .…”

Airy-soliton interactions in self-defocusing media with PT potentials

“…The potential arising from combining both methods to investigate interactions of accelerating beams and solitons opens completely new aspects of research. In the past decade, Airy beams in different NL media were widely studied, such as Kerr NL dielectrics [12][13][14][15][16], photorefractive media [17], nonlocal NL media [18,19], and quadratic media [12,20]. Because of the existence of nonlinearities, self-trapped beams can be realized with Airy-like beams/pulses [21][22][23][24][25] and self-accelerating solitary-like waves can also be found [13,14,17,20,[26][27][28].…”