Three-Airy Beams, Their Propagation in the Fresnel Zone, the Autofocusing Plane Location, as Well as Generalizing Beams

Abstract

A family of 2D light fields consisting of the product of three Airy functions with linear arguments has been studied theoretically and experimentally. These fields, called three-Airy beams, feature a parameter shift and have a cubic phase and a super-Gaussian circular intensity in the far zone. Transformations of three-Airy beams in the Fresnel zone have been studied using theoretical, numerical, and experimental means. It has been shown that the autofocusing plane of a three-Airy beam is similar to the square root of the shift parameter. We also introduce generalized three-Airy beams containing nine free parameters, and obtain their Fourier transform in a closed form.