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.
https://hal-centralesupelec.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01462841 Contributor : Sébastien van LucheneConnect in order to contact the contributor Submitted on : Thursday, February 9, 2017 - 8:50:55 AM Last modification on : Wednesday, November 3, 2021 - 4:49:41 AM