title: Accelerating light beams with arbitrarily transverse shapes.
abstract: Accelerating beams are wave packets that preserve their shape while propagating along curved trajectories. Their unique characteristics have opened the door to applications that range from optical micromanipulation and plasma-channel generation to laser micromachining. Here, we demonstrate, theoretically and experimentally, that accelerating beams can be generated with a variety of arbitrarily chosen transverse shapes. We present a general method to construct such beams in the paraxial and nonparaxial regime and demonstrate experimentally their propagation in the paraxial case. The key ingredient of our method is the use of the spectral representation of the accelerating beams, which offers a unique and compact description of these beams. The on-demand accelerating light patterns described here are likely to give rise to new applications and add versatility to the current ones.
authors.forename: Adrian
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ruelas
authors.forename: Jeffrey A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Davis
authors.forename: Ignacio
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Moreno
authors.forename: Don M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Cottrell
authors.forename: Miguel A
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Bandres