Natural focusing of symmetric Airy beams

TL;DR

This paper investigates the natural focusing properties of symmetric Airy beams, revealing their unique caustic structures and stability, and relating them to special functions like Airy and Scorer functions.

Contribution

It introduces a new class of symmetric Airy beams with unique focusing characteristics and analyzes their caustic structures and stability experimentally.

Findings

Symmetric Airy beams exhibit distinct caustic morphologies.

The beams are related to Airy and Scorer functions.

Their structural stability is experimentally confirmed.

Abstract

In this work we study the natural focusing of Airy beams symmetric under reflection of the transverse coordinates. Following a recent proposal, their angular spectra depend on the absolute value of the third power of the transverse components of the wave vector. We show that these beams are related to Airy and Scorer special functions. The caustics have a morphology that does not correspond to the ones described by standard catastrophe optics. The structural stability of symmetric Airy beams is experimentally probed