Tailoring accelerating beams in phase space

Yuanhui Wen, Yujie Chen, Yanfeng Zhang, Hui Chen, and Siyuan Yu
Phys. Rev. A 95, 023825 – Published 14 February 2017

Abstract

An appropriate wave-front design will enable light fields that propagate along arbitrary trajectories, thus forming accelerating beams in free space. Previous strategies for designing such accelerating beams rely mainly on caustic methods, which start from diffraction integrals and deal only with two-dimensional fields. Here we introduce an alternate perspective to construct accelerating beams in phase space by designing the corresponding Wigner distribution function (WDF). We find that such a WDF-based method is capable of providing both the initial field distribution and the angular spectrum in need by projecting the WDF into the real space and the Fourier space, respectively. Moreover, this approach applies to the construction of both two- and three-dimensional fields, greatly generalizing previous caustic methods. It may therefore open a new route for construction of highly tailored accelerating beams and facilitate applications ranging from particle manipulation and trapping to optical routing as well as material processing.

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  • Received 5 July 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.95.023825

©2017 American Physical Society

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Yuanhui Wen1, Yujie Chen1,*, Yanfeng Zhang1, Hui Chen1, and Siyuan Yu1,2

  • 1State Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Materials and Technologies, School of Electronics and Information Technology, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, China
  • 2Photonics Group, Merchant Venturers School of Engineering, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UB, United Kingdom

  • *chenyj69@mail.sysu.edu.cn

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Issue

Vol. 95, Iss. 2 — February 2017

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