An Airy beam is a non-diffractive wave which propagates along a ballistic trajectory without any external force.
Although it is impossible to implement ideal Airy beams because they carry infinite power, so-called finite Airy beams
can be achieved by tailoring infinite side lobes with an aperture function and they have similar propagating
characteristics with those of ideal Airy beams. The finite Airy beam can be optically generated by several ways: the
optical Fourier transform system with imposing cubic phase to a broad Gaussian beam, nonlinear generation of Airy
beams, curved plasma channel generation, and electron beam generation. In this presentation, a holographic generation
of the finite Airy beams will be discussed. The finite Airy beams can be generated in virtue of holographic technique by
‘reading’ a hologram which is recorded by the interference between a finite Airy beam generated by the optical Fourier
transform and a reference plane wave. Moreover, this method can exploit the unique features of holography itself such as
successful reconstruction with the imperfect incidence of reference beam, reconstruction of phase-conjugated signal
beam, and multiplexing, which can shed more light on the characteristics of finite Airy beams. This method has an
advantage in that once holograms are recorded in the photopolymer, a bulky optics such as the SLM and lenses are not
necessary to generate Airy beams. In addition, multiple Airy beams can be stored and reconstructed simultaneously or
individually.
We propose an approach that improves the characteristics of a subwavelength light spot from a tapered aperture without
increment of the subwavelength spot size, via simply introducing a taper along the aperture shape. Two advantageous
features of the proposed tapered structure are investigated: At first, by enlarging the entrance area of the aperture, it
could collect more light with respect to the regular one. Thus the funneled light contributes to the field enhancement.
Furthermore, the tapered edges of the exit surface of the aperture provide confined field, a wedge mode, which is
bounded strongly and enhances the local electric field around the edge of the aperture. The enhanced characteristics of
subwavelength spot in vertically-tapered aperture, including peak intensity, power throughput, and full width half
maximum were obtained numerically using finite difference time domain method. The proposed device is fabricated
using conventional planar fabrication techniques and focused ion beam milling to realize the tapered structure. The
relative tapered angle-dependent enhancements are presented with experimental and quantitative demonstrations of the
proposed structure.
New Airy beam manipulation method based on the metallic slit array is presented. By controlling the phases and
intensities of the transmitted lights from each subwavelength metallic slit via the variations of the parameters such as
widths, heights, positions, and numbers of the slits, the overall phase and intensity distributions of the transmitted light
are designed to mimic that of Airy beam. The proposed method can effectively produce the Airy wave packet in microscale
without any spatial light modulator (SLM) and lens. The numerical result and considerations on the design method
to make compact structure to generate the Airy wave packet will be presented.
We will discuss methods to generate spatially collimated beams from surface plasmon polaritons. The representative
method discussed in this paper is coupling surface plasmon polaritons, which are excited on a metal surface from a subwavelength
metal slit, into collimated radiating fields with the use of surface gratings attached on the metal surface. In
addition, the beam manipulation method by using multiple metallic waveguides, in which each waveguide has different
width and length, will be discussed. With the aid of these methods, we will present three kinds of beams; on- and off-axis
directional beams and a focused beam.
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