Experimental demonstration of 3D accelerating beam arrays

Abstract

Accelerating beams have attracted much attention in the frontiers of optical physics and technology owing to their unique propagation dynamics of nondiffracting, self-healing, and freely accelerating along curved trajectories. Such behaviors essentially arise from the particular phase factor occurring in their spatial frequency spectrum, e.g., the cubic phase associated to the spectrum of Airy beam. In this paper, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a sort of accelerating beam arrays, which are composed of spatially separated accelerating beams. By superimposing kinoforms of multifocal patterns into the spatial frequency spectrum of accelerating beams, different types of beam arrays, e.g., Airy beam arrays and two-main-lobe accelerating beam arrays, are generated and measured by scanning a reflection mirror near the focal region along the optical axis. The 3D intensity patterns reconstructed from the experimental data present good agreement with the theoretical counterparts. The combination of accelerating beams with optical beam arrays proposed here may find potential applications in various fields such as optical microscopes, optical micromachining, optical trapping, and so on.