Optical catastrophes of the swallowtail and butterfly beams

Abstract

We experimentally realize higher-order catastrophic structures in light fields to access the rich class of caustic swallowtail and butterfly beams. These beams present solutions of paraxial diffraction catastrophe integrals that are determined by potential functions, whose singular mapping manifests as caustic hypersurfaces in control parameter space. We systematically analyze the swallowtail and butterfly beams' caustics analytically and observe their field distributions experimentally in real and Fourier space. Their spectra can be described by polynomials or expressions with rational exponents capable to form a cusp.

References in corpus (2)

• Lyman Break Galaxies Under a Microscope: The Small Scale Dynamics and Mass of an Arc in the Cluster 1E0657-56
• Coherent and incoherent nonparaxial self-accelerating Weber beams

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Dynamics of the optical swallowtail catastrophe
• Pearcey solitons in curved nonlinear photonic caustic lattices
• Metaplectic geometrical optics for modeling caustics in uniform and nonuniform media
• Self-accelerating beam dynamics in the space fractional Schrödinger equation
• Finite-energy accelerating beam dynamics in wavelet-based representations
• First Steps Toward the Development of a Straight-Line Reference Alignment System for Future Accelerators at CERN Using Pseudo-Nondiffracting Layer Beams