Arbitrarily accelerating space-time wave packets

All known realizations of optical wave packets that accelerate along their propagation axis, such as Airy wave packets in dispersive media or wave-front-modulated X-waves, exhibit a constant acceleration; that is, the group velocity varies linearly with propagation. Here we synthesize space-time wave packets that travel in free space with arbitrary axial acceleration profiles, including group velocities that change with integer or fractional exponents of the distance. Furthermore, we realize a composite acceleration profile: the wave packet accelerates from an initial to a terminal group velocity, before decelerating back to the initial value. These never-before-seen optical-acceleration phenomena are produced using the same experimental arrangement that precisely sculpts the wave packet's spatio-temporal spectral structure. (C) 2022 Optical Society of America