Bifurcating trajectory of non-diffractive electromagnetic Airy pulse

The explicit expression for spatial-temporal Airy pulse is derived from the Maxwell's equations in paraxial approximation. The trajectory of the pulse in the time-space coordinates is analysed. The existence of a bifurcation point that separates regions with qualitatively different features of the pulse propagation is demonstrated. At this point the velocity of the pulse becomes infinite and the orientation of it changes to the opposite

Bifurcating trajectory of non-diffractive electromagnetic Airy pulse

The explicit expression for spatial-temporal Airy pulse is derived from the Maxwell’s equations in paraxial approximation. The trajectory of the pulse in the time-space coordinates is analysed. The existence of a bifurcation point that separates regions with qualitatively different features of the pulse propagation is demonstrated. At this point the velocity of the pulse becomes infinite and the orientation of it changes to the opposite. OCIS Codes: (050.1940) Diffraction; (260.2110) Electromagnetic optics; (350.5500) Propagation Intensive theoretical and experimental investigations of Airy beams are motivated by their unusual features (non-diffractive propagation, accelerating motion, and self-healing). A solution to the Schrodinger equation in the form of the nonspreading accelerating Airy wave function found by Berry and Balazs in 1979 [1] inspired Siviloglou et al to put forward the concept of electromagnetic Airy beams with similar properties [2,3]. This idea is based on the analogy of the paraxial equatio