Nonparaxial abruptly autofocusing beams

TL;DR

This paper investigates nonparaxial autofocusing optical beams with engineered trajectories, demonstrating their superior focusing properties such as higher contrast and smaller focus sizes compared to paraxial beams.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of nonparaxial autofocusing beams with pre-designed trajectories, highlighting their enhanced focusing capabilities over traditional paraxial beams.

Findings

Nonparaxial beams have higher intensity contrast.

They can focus at smaller distances.

They achieve smaller spot sizes than paraxial beams.

Abstract

We study nonparaxial autofocusing beams with pre-engineered trajectories. We consider the case of linearly polarized electric optical beams and examine their focusing properties such as contrast, beam width, and numerical aperture. Such beams are associated with larger intensity contrasts, can focus at smaller distances, and have smaller spot sizes as compared to the paraxial regime.