The self-accelerating beams such as the Airy beam show great potentials in
many applications including optical manipulation, imaging and communication.
However, their superior features during linear propagation could be easily
corrupted by optical nonlinearity or spatial incoherence individually. Here we
investigate how the interaction of spatial incoherence and nonlinear
propagation affect the beam quality of Airy beam, and find that the two
destroying factors can in fact balance each other. Our results show that the
influence of coherence and nonlinearity on the propagation of PIABs can be
formulated as two exponential functions that have factors of opposite signs.
With appropriate spatial coherence length, the PIABs not only resist the
corruption of beam profile caused by self-focusing nonlinearity, but also
exhibits less anomalous diffraction caused by the self-defocusing nonlinearity.
Our work provides deep insight into how to maintain the beam quality of
self-accelerating Airy beams by exploiting the interaction between partially
incoherence and optical nonlinearity. Our results may bring about new
possibilities for optimizing partially incoherent structured field and
developing related applications such as optical communication, incoherent
imaging and optical manipulations.Comment: 11pages,6 figure