title: Self-accelerating beams in photonic crystals.
abstract: We find accelerating beams in a general periodic optical system, such as photonic crystal slabs, honeycomb lattices, and various metamaterials. These beams retain a shape-preserving profile while bending to highly non-paraxial angles along a circular-like trajectory. The properties of such beams depend on the crystal lattice structure: on a small-scale, the fine features of the beams profile are uniquely derived from the exact structure of the crystalline cells, while on a large-scale the beam only depends on the periodicity of the lattice, asymptotically reaching the free-space analytic solutions when the wavelength is much larger than the cell size. We demonstrate such beams in a 2D Kronig-Penney separable model, but our methodology of finding such solutions is general, predicting accelerating beams in any periodic structure. This highlights how light can be guided through a general system by only tailoring the incoming field, without altering the structure itself.
authors.affiliation: Physics Department and Solid State Institute, Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel.
authors.forename: Ido
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Kaminer
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nemirovsky
authors.forename: Konstantinos G
authors.initials: KG
authors.lastname: Makris
authors.forename: Mordechai
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Segev
mesh_terms: D000054:Acceleration; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003460:Crystallization; D008027:Light; D008420:Manufactured Materials; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D017785:Photons; D012542:Scattering, Radiation