Abstract

Nonsymmetric curved beams having a symmetric caustic skeleton are presented. They arise from a finite jump in the symmetric spectral phase that breaks the symmetry of the beam intensity without altering its associated caustic curve. These nonsymmetric beams can be represented as a superposition of two caustic beams whose wave fields have well-defined even and odd symmetries with weight coefficients dependent on the phase jump. In this approach, the phase jump acts as a measure of the beam asymmetry degree that can be easily controlled in experiments. This scheme is a promising step towards optical cryptography and quantum optics applications.

© 2018 Optical Society of America

Caustic beams from unusual powers of the spectral phase

Pablo Vaveliuk, Alberto Lencina, and Óscar Martínez-Matos
Opt. Lett. 42(19) 4008-4011 (2017)

Abruptly autofocusing beams from phase perturbations having forced symmetry

Dafne Amaya, Óscar Martínez-Matos, and Pablo Vaveliuk
Opt. Lett. 44(15) 3733-3736 (2019)

Intensity-symmetric Airy beams

P. Vaveliuk, Alberto Lencina, Jose A. Rodrigo, and Ó. Martnez-Matos
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 32(3) 443-446 (2015)

Engineering wavefront caustics trajectories in PT-symmetric lattices

Nicholas Bender, Hamidreza Ramezani, and Tsampikos Kottos
Opt. Lett. 40(9) 2138-2141 (2015)

Intensity-symmetric accelerating caustic beams

Zhijun Ren, Hongzhen Jin, Baojin Peng, and Yile Shi
Appl. Opt. 55(27) 7694-7699 (2016)