title: Airy beam self-focusing in a photorefractive medium.
abstract: The unique bending and shape-preserving properties of optical Airy beams offer a large range of applications in for example beam routing, optical waveguiding, particle manipulation and plasmonics. In these applications and others, the Airy beam may experience nonlinear light-matter interactions which in turn modify the Airy beam properties and propagation. A well-known example is light self-focusing that leads to the formation of spatial soliton. Here, we unveil experimentally the self-focusing properties of a 1D-Airy beam in a photorefractive crystal under focusing conditions. The transient evolution involves both self-bending and acceleration of the initially launched Airy beam due to the onset of an off-shooting soliton and the resulting nonlocal refractive index perturbation. Both the transient and stationary self-focusing properties can be tuned by varying the bias electric field, the injected Airy beam power and the background illumination.
authors.affiliation: LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université de Lorraine, 57070 METZ, France.
authors.forename: Noémi
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Wiersma
authors.affiliation: LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université de Lorraine, 57070 METZ, France.|LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, 57070 METZ, France.
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Marsal
authors.affiliation: LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université de Lorraine, 57070 METZ, France.|LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, 57070 METZ, France.
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sciamanna
authors.affiliation: LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université de Lorraine, 57070 METZ, France.|LMOPS, CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, 57070 METZ, France.
authors.forename: Delphine
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wolfersberger