Radial carpet beams: A class of nondiffracting, accelerating, and self-healing beams

Abstract

Self-accelerating shape-invariant beams are attracting major attention, presenting applications in many areas such as laser manipulation and patterning, light-sheet microscopy, and plasma channels. Moreover, optical lattices are offering many applications, including quantum computation, quantum phase transition, spin-exchange interaction, and realization of magnetic fields. We report observation of a class of accelerating and self-healing beams which covers the features required by all the aforementioned applications. These beams are accelerating, shape invariant, and self-healing for more than several tens of meters, have numerous phase anomalies and unprecedented patterns, and can be feasibly tuned. Diffraction of a plane wave from radial phase gratings generates such beams, and due to their beauty and structural complexity we have called them ``carpet'' beams. By tuning the value of phase variations over the grating, the resulting carpet patterns are converted into two-dimensional optical lattices with polar symmetry. Furthermore, the number of spokes in the radial grating, phase variation amplitude, and wavelength of the impinging light beam can also be adjusted to obtain additional features. We believe that radial carpet beams and lattices might find more applications in optical micromanipulation, optical lithography, super-resolution imaging, lighting design, optical communication through atmosphere, etc.