Production of Dynamic Frozen Waves: Controlling shape, location (and speed) of diffraction-resistant beams

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to generate dynamic, shape-controlled diffraction-resistant optical beams called Frozen Waves, allowing their shape and position to evolve over time, with experimental validation using holography and spatial light modulators.

Contribution

It extends the theory of Frozen Waves to include dynamic, time-evolving shapes and demonstrates experimental creation of such beams in optics.

Findings

Successful experimental generation of dynamic FWs with controlled shape evolution

Demonstration of a cylindrical light surface changing in space and time

Validation of the theoretical model through holographic techniques

Abstract

In recent times, we experimentally realized a quite efficient modeling of the shape of diffraction-resistant optical beams; thus generating for the first time the so-called Frozen Waves (FW), whose longitudinal intensity pattern can be arbitrarily chosen, within a prefixed space interval of the propagation axis. Such waves possess a host of potential applications: in medicine, biomedical optics, optical tweezers, atom guiding, remote sensing, tractor beams, optical communications or metrology, and other topics in photonic areas. In this work, we extend our theory of FWs -- which led to beams endowed with a static envelope -- through a dynamic modeling of the FWs, whose shape is now allowed to evolve in time in a predetermined way. And we experimentally create such dynamic FWs in Optics, via a computational holographic technique and a spatial light modulator. Experimental results are here presented for two cases of dynamic FWs, one of the zeroth and the other of higher order, the last one being the most interesting, consisting in a cylindrical surface of light whose geometry changes in space and time.