Tailoring Accelerating Beams in Phase Space

Abstract

An appropriate design of wavefront will enable light fields propagating along arbitrary trajectories thus forming accelerating beams in free space. Previous ways of designing such accelerating beams mainly rely on caustic methods, which start from diffraction integrals and only deal with two-dimensional fields. Here we introduce a new perspective to construct accelerating beams in phase space by designing the corresponding Wigner distribution function (WDF). We find such a WDF-based method is capable of providing both the initial field distribution and the angular spectrum in need by projecting the WDF into the real space and the Fourier space respectively. Moreover, this approach applies to the construction of both two- and three-dimensional fields, greatly generalizing previous caustic methods. It may therefore open up a new route to construct highly-tailored accelerating beams and facilitate applications ranging from particle manipulation and trapping to optical routing as well as material processing.

8 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Self accelerating electron Airy beams
• Generation and near-field imaging of Airy surface plasmons
• Plasmonic Airy Beam on Metal Surface
• Airy beam induced optical routing
• Arbitrary Bending Plasmonic Light Waves
• A method to generate complex quasi-nondiffracting optical lattices
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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Obstacle evasion in free-space optical communications utilizing Airy beams
• Generation of biaxially accelerating static Airy light-sheets with 3D-printed freeform micro-optics