Ultrabroadband Airy light bullets

Airy–Bessel wave packets as versatile linear light bullets

The generation of spatiotemporal optical wave packets that are impervious to both dispersion and diffraction has been a fascinating challenge1. Despite intense research activity, such localized waves, referred to as light bullets, have remained elusive. In nonlinear propagation, three-dimensional light bullets tend to disintegrate as a result of inherent instabilities2,3. Threedimensional wave ...

Optimal compression and energy confinement of optical Airy bullets.

We report on an approach to generate non-diffractive and non-dispersive Airy3 bullets with enhanced spatio-temporal energy confinement. By appropriately reshaping the initial spectral components in the Fourier domain, the resulting optical bullets show a significant enhancement of their central lobe intensity while exhibiting a reduced spatio-temporal outspread of the surrounding sub...

Exploring Bessel beams, Airy beams, and Hydrogen-like linear bullets

Light bullets in optical tandems.

We address the concept of three-dimensional light bullet formation in structures where nonlinearity and dispersion are contributed by different materials, including metamaterials, which are used at their best to create suitable conditions where bullets can form. The particular geometry considered here consists of alternating rings made of highly dispersive but weakly nonlinear media and strongl...

Stable discrete surface light bullets.

We analyze spatiotemporal light localization near the edge of a semi-infinite array of weakly coupled nonlinear optical waveguides and demonstrate the existence of a novel class of continuous-discrete spatiotemporal solitons, the so-called discrete surface light bullets. We show that their properties are strongly affected by the presence of the surface. To this end the crossover between surface...