Sending femtosecond pulses in circles: highly nonparaxial accelerating beams

François Courvoisier (1) , Amaury Mathis (1) , Luc Froehly (1) , Remo Giust (1) , Luca Furfaro (1) , Pierre-Ambroise Lacourt (1) , Maxime Jacquot (1) , John Michael Dudley (1)

1 FEMTO-ST - Franche-Comté Électronique Mécanique, Thermique et Optique - Sciences et Technologies (UMR 6174)

We use caustic beam shaping on 100 fs pulses to experimentally generate nonparaxial accelerating beams along a 60° circular arc, moving laterally by 14 µm over a 28 µm propagation length. This is the highest degree of transverse acceleration reported to our knowledge. Using diffraction integral theory and numerical beam propagation simulations, we show that circular acceleration trajectories represent a unique class of nonparaxial diffraction-free beam profile which also preserves the femtosecond temporal structure in the vicinity of the caustic.

Domaines: Optique / photonique; Optique [physics.optics]

François Courvoisier, Amaury Mathis, Luc Froehly, Remo Giust, Luca Furfaro, et al.. Sending femtosecond pulses in circles: highly nonparaxial accelerating beams. Optics Letters, 2012, 37, pp.1736 - 1738. ⟨10.1364/OL.37.001736⟩. ⟨hal-00944536⟩