A Highly Adjustable Helical Beam: Design and Propagation Characteristic

TL;DR

This paper introduces a highly adjustable helical beam with controllable propagation features, including confinement, nondiffraction, and power distribution, achieved through caustic-based design, enabling diverse optical applications.

Contribution

The authors present a novel caustic method to design helical beams with adjustable parameters, achieving near nondiffracting propagation and high power confinement.

Findings

Main lobe contains nearly 50% of optical power

Peak intensity fluctuation remains below 15% during propagation

Beam parameters such as radius, period, and rotations are highly adjustable

Abstract

Light fields with extraordinary propagation behaviours such as nondiffracting and self-bending are useful in optical delivery for energy, information, and even objects. A kind of helical beams is constructed here based on the caustic method. With appropriate design, the main lobe of these helical beams can be both well-confined and almost nondiffracting while moving along a helix with its radius, period, the number of rotations and main lobes highly adjustable. In addition, the main lobe contains almost half of the optical power and the peak intensity fluctuates below 15% during propagation. These promising characteristics may enable a variety of potential applications based on these beams.