Highly Efficient and Integrated Nonlinear Airy Beams Generation

Owing to its peculiar non-diffraction, self-acceleration, and self-healing properties, the Airy beam has attracted a great deal of attention in various fields such as micro-manipulation, plasma generation, and optical microscopy. To date, it is still a challenge to generate nonlinear Airy beams with microstructure efficiently, thus limiting applications of such Airy beams. Here, a novel and efficient method for generating Airy beams is experimentally demonstrated by microstructure on a nonlinear crystal surface, which is fabricated by a focused ion beam (FIB) technique. The second-harmonic (SH) Airy beams are generated in the far field and characterize their intensity distributions, which agree well with theoretical results. Then, the self-accelerating and self-healing properties of the generated SH Airy beams are demonstrated. Besides, the normalized efficiency of SH Airy beams is measured at (1.44 x 10-5%W-1), and compare the efficiency of different methods of generating nonlinear Airy beams, which shows the advantages of this method. The proposed method of generating nonlinear Airy beams shows great potential for integrated optics, optical micro-machining, and advanced imaging.