Investigating group-velocity-tunable propagation-invariant optical wave-packets

Zhaoyang Li; Yanqi Liu; Yuxin Leng; Ruxin Li

doi:10.1038/s41598-022-20601-0

Investigating group-velocity-tunable propagation-invariant optical wave-packets

Sci Rep. 2022 Sep 27;12(1):16102. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-20601-0.

Authors

Zhaoyang Li^{1

2}, Yanqi Liu³, Yuxin Leng³, Ruxin Li^{4

3

5}

Affiliations

¹ Zhangjiang Laboratory, 100 Haike Road, Pudong, 201210, Shanghai, China. lizy@zjlab.ac.cn.
² Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, 2-6 Yamada-oka, Suita, Osaka, 565-0871, Japan. lizy@zjlab.ac.cn.
³ Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 390 Qinghe Road, Jiading, 201800, Shanghai, China.
⁴ Zhangjiang Laboratory, 100 Haike Road, Pudong, 201210, Shanghai, China.
⁵ ShanghaiTech University, 393 Middle Huaxia Road, Pudong, 201210, Shanghai, China.

Abstract

The group-velocity of the propagation-invariant optical wave-packet generated by the conical superposition can be controlled by introducing well-designed arbitrarily-axisymmetric pulse-front deformation, which permits realizing superluminal, subluminal, accelerating, decelerating, and even nearly-programmable group-velocities. To better understand the tunability of the group-velocity, the generation methods of this propagation-invariant optical wave-packet and the mechanisms of the tunable group-velocity in both the physical and Fourier spaces are investigated. We also have studied the relationship with the recently-reported space-time wave-packet, and this group-velocity-tunable propagation-invariant optical wave-packet should be a subset of the space-time wave-packet.