Abstract Elegant Hermite-Gauss beams are a well-known family of structured beams. Although Siegman proposed them several decades ago, their properties continue to be studied and exploited. In this work, a group theory-based framework that introduces new classes of symmetric elegant beams is presented. Our formulation exploits the algebraic properties of the dihedral group of rotations and reflections to transform an input beam into a closed-form family of interference patterns with dihedral symmetry. Our approach is inspired by one of the outcomes of this work: elegant Hermite-Gauss beams can be described as a dihedral interference pattern of elegant traveling waves, a new set of solutions to the paraxial equation also developed in this paper. Taking elegant traveling waves as input beams, they are transformed into what we have called elegant dihedral beams. They have dihedral-symmetric transverse profiles and quasi-crystalline properties, including features like phase singularities, self-healing, and pseudo-nondiffracting propagation, as well as containing elegant Hermite and Laguerre-Gauss beams as special cases.
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