Airy beam

[2] In 2007 researchers from the University of Central Florida (United States) were able to create and observe an Airy beam for the first time in both one- and two-dimensional configurations.

The members of the team were Georgios Siviloglou, John Broky, Aristide Dogariu, and Demetrios Christodoulides.

[4] Furthermore, it has been shown[5] that any function on the real line can be mapped to an accelerating beam with a different transverse shape.

In 2009 accelerating "Airy like" beams have been observed for the first time in material, notably a system with optical nonlinear behaviour, by a joint team of Pavia University and L'Aquila University (Italy); the members of the team were Jacopo Parravicini, Paolo Minzioni, Vittorio Degiorgio (from Pavia), and Eugenio DelRe (from L'Aquila).

[6] Subsequently, this kind of beams has been investigated in 2011 and 2012 mainly by the teams of University of Central Florida.

[10][11] Acceleration can also take place along a radial instead of a cartesian coordinate, which is the case of circular-Airy abruptly autofocusing waves[12] and their extension to arbitrary (nonparabolic) caustics.

[14][15] With careful engineering of the input waveform, light can be made to accelerate along arbitrary trajectories in media that possess discrete[16] or continuous[17] periodicity.

In 2018, scientists determined the cubic phase of Airy beams in a system analogous to surface gravity water-waves.

Researchers at the University of St. Andrews have used Airy beams to manipulate small particles, moving them along curves and around corners.

[25][26] This technique has been adapted to use multi-photon excitation[27] and attenuation-compensated Airy beams[28][29] to achieve imaging at greater depths within biological specimens.

The accelerating and diffraction-free features of the Airy wavepacket have also been utilized by researchers at the University of Crete to produce two-dimensional, circular-Airy waves, termed abruptly-autofocusing beams.