Abstract:

Optical Airy beams or pulses, famous for a self-accelerating intense peak, have recently attracted a great deal of attention triggered by their intriguing properties and unique advantages in a variety of applications. Under the action of nonlinearities, such wave packets tend to lose their peculiar structures and the associated accelerating dynamics are accordingly degraded. To circumvent this inconvenience, nonlinear self-accelerating beams/pulses were conceived, leading to more possibilities to shape a nonlinear process into an accelerating configuration. Here, we present a review on these nonlinear self-accelerating wave packets following our recent works. Their physical picture and connection with the Airy wave packets are discussed. Then we focus on their accelerating property that shows exotic features in controlling nonlinear dynamics, visualizing optical nonlinear responses and guiding other light. In the end, a new kind of self-accelerating beams is introduced, exhibiting a mechanism in analogy to the interaction between matters of opposite mass signs. These nonlinear wave packets have brought the nonlinear dynamics into a region of a curved space or space-time, and more fantastic phenomena and applications which are otherwise hard to reach in flat space are expected.

Key words: Optical field manipulation, Optical nonlinear dynamics, Optical Airy field, Selfacceleration