# Airy beams and accelerating waves: An overview of recent advances

## TL;DR

This paper reviews recent advances in Airy beams and accelerating waves, highlighting their fundamental properties, control methods, and diverse applications in optics and related fields.

## Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of new families of accelerating waves, their control techniques, and their applications, summarizing progress since 2007.

## Key findings

- Identification of new families of accelerating waves in various domains.
- Development of methods to control wave trajectories and properties.
- Demonstration of applications in biomedical imaging, particle manipulation, and material processing.

## Abstract

Over the last dozen of years, the area of accelerating waves has made considerable advances not only in terms of fundamentals and experimental demonstrations but also in connection to a wide range of applications. Starting from the prototypical Airy beam that was proposed and observed in 2007, new families of accelerating waves have been identified in the paraxial and nonparaxial domains in space and/or time, with different methods developed to control at will their trajectory, amplitude, and beam width. Accelerating optical waves exhibit a number of highly desirable attributes. They move along a curved or accelerating trajectory while being resilient to perturbations (self-healing), and, are diffraction-free. It is because of these particular features that accelerating waves have been utilized in a variety of applications in the areas of filamentation, beam focusing, particle manipulation, biomedical imaging, plasmons, and material processing among others.