Airy Beam for Free-Space Photonic Interconnection: Generation Strategy and Trajectory Manipulation

Abstract

Self-accelerating beams have attracted worldwide research attentions due to their intriguingly curved trajectory with localized peak intensity and the characteristic of self-healing after obstacles. We first put forward a generation vector to analytically describe general trajectory manipulation for 2-D Airy beam. Based on the successful trajectory manipulation of 2-D Airy beam, a 100 Gbps NRZ-OOK real-time free-space photonic interconnection is experimentally demonstrated. Our results indicate that the bending trajectory can break the constraints of traditional free-space photonic interconnection where the receiver has to be set under the condition of line-of-sight. Meanwhile, by taking the power correction factor into account of the beam width variation, we propose a metric of normalized power density (NPD) in order to characterize the power density variation of beam main lobe along the free-space propagation. After calculating the 3 dB NPD range of both Airy beam and Gaussian beam, we identify that the power density of Airy beam main lobe can be maintained for a longer free-space reach than a Gaussian beam with the same minimum width.