Control on the anomalous interactions of Airy beams in nematic liquid crystals.

Ming Shen,Ray-Kuang Lee,Wei Li

doi:10.1364/oe.24.008501

Abstract

We reveal a controllable manipulation of anomalous interactions between Airy beams in nonlocal nematic liquid crystals numerically. With the help of an in-phase fundamental Gaussian beam, attraction between in-phase Airy beams can be suppressed or become a repulsive one to each other; whereas the attraction can be strengthened when the Gaussian beam is out-of-phase. In contrast to the repulsive interaction in local media, stationary bound states of breathing Airy soliton pairs are found in nematic liquid crystals.

Highlights

During the past several years, self-accelerating Airy beams [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] have drawn considerable attention due to their unique characteristics, such as ballistic motion [9,10], self-healing [11,12,13], etc
The dynamics of spatial Airy solitons [31,32] and spatiotemporal Airy light bullets [33,34,35,36] have been studied in different nonlinear physical settings
With a fundamental beam, we reveal that the interactions between in-phase Airy beams is controllable

Summary

Introduction

During the past several years, self-accelerating Airy beams [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8] have drawn considerable attention due to their unique characteristics, such as ballistic motion [9,10], self-healing [11,12,13], etc. In nonlocal media, it has been shown that nonlocality provides a long-range attractive force, leading to the formation of stable bound states of both out-of-phase bright solitons [52,53,54] and dark solitons [55,56,57,58] Based on this effect of nonlocality, in our previous work, we have obtained stationary bound states (soliton pairs) of in-phase as well as out-of-phase Airy beams in nonlocal nonlinear media [42]. The evolution of a two-dimensional broad accelerating Airy beam interacting with an intense Gaussian beam was studied numerically and experimentally to demonstrate gravitational dynamics (general relativity) in lead glass with a nonlocal thermal nonlinearity [59]. In contrast to only repulsive force in local media, such a nonlolcal attractive force provided by nematic liquid crystals leads to the formation of stationary bound states of breathing Airy soliton pairs of in-phase as well as out-of-phase beams

Model and basic equations

Anomalous interactions of Airy beams with in-phase Gaussian beam

Conclusions