Spatiotemporal airy light bullets in the linear and nonlinear regimes

Phys Rev Lett. 2010 Dec 17;105(25):253901. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.253901. Epub 2010 Dec 15.

Abstract

We demonstrate the realization of intense Airy-Airy-Airy (Airy(3)) light bullets by combining a spatial Airy beam with an Airy pulse in time. The Airy(3) light bullets belong to a family of linear spatiotemporal wave packets that do not require any specific tuning of the material optical properties for their formation and withstand both diffraction and dispersion during their propagation. We show that the Airy(3) light bullets are robust up to the high intensity regime, since they are capable of healing the nonlinearly induced distortions of their spatiotemporal profile.