Airy beam self-focusing in a photorefractive medium

Noemi Wiersma (1) , Nicolas Marsal (1) , Marc Sciamanna (1) , Delphine Wolfersberger (1)

1 LMOPS - Laboratoire Matériaux Optiques, Photonique et Systèmes

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.

Domains: Physics [physics]

Noemi Wiersma, Nicolas Marsal, Marc Sciamanna, Delphine Wolfersberger. Airy beam self-focusing in a photorefractive medium. Scientific Reports, 2016, 6, pp.35078. ⟨10.1038/srep35078⟩. ⟨hal-01462841⟩