Accelerating beam propagation in refractive-index potentials

作者：Efremidis Nikolaos K^*

来源：Physical Review A, 2014, 89(2): 023841.

DOI：10.1103/PhysRevA.89.023841

We study the dynamics of spatially accelerating beams impinging on refractive-index potentials. We concentrate our attention to the particular case of Airy-type optical waves that are reflected and transmitted by two generic classes of potentials. These are (a) localized potentials whose index contrast reduces to zero outside a specific region and (b) smooth-interface sigmoid-type potentials that take different constant values outside a bounded region. We find analytic expressions for the beam dynamics for particular types of potentials which are in excellent agreement with the numerical simulations. Our results show that, in general, the parabolic trajectory of the Airy wave is not maintained by the transmitted and reflected waves. An exception is made in the case of reflection from piecewise linear potentials, where the reflected wave follows a parabolic trajectory that is, in general, different from the incident.

• 出版日期2014-2-25