Acta Optica Sinica, Volume. 42, Issue 16, 1626001(2022)
Caustics and Wavefronts of Butterfly-Shaped Beams
A novel butterfly-shaped beam based on diffraction catastrophe is proposed and experimentally generated. According to the catastrophe theory, the light field structures of the beams are defined by the potential function composed of the state and control variables. The caustics of the beams are theoretically manifested as hypersurfaces in four-dimensional space due to the high dimensionality of the control variables, and these beams display diverse light field structures when they are mapped into a low-dimensional space. Furthermore, different light field structures of the beams can be obtained by manipulating the control variables. It is found that the spectral amplitudes of the beams can be expressed as polynomials. The experimental results are in good agreement with the numerical simulation ones. These beams have excellent properties including curved propagation trajectories and various light field structures, which are likely to be applied to wavefront control, optical micromanipulation, and biomedicine.
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Yiming Cai, Houan Teng, Juntao Hu, Yanping Lan, Zhijun Ren, Yixian Qian. Caustics and Wavefronts of Butterfly-Shaped Beams[J]. Acta Optica Sinica, 2022, 42(16): 1626001
Category: Physical Optics
Received: Jan. 21, 2022
Accepted: Mar. 10, 2022
Published Online: Aug. 4, 2022
The Author Email: Qian Yixian (qianyixian@zjnu.edu.cn)