Airy beam optical parametric oscillator

Airy beam, a non-diffracting waveform, has peculiar properties of self-healing and self-acceleration. Due to such unique properties, the Airy beam finds many applications including curved plasma wave-guiding, micro-particle manipulation, optically mediated particle clearing, long distance communication, and nonlinear frequency conversion. However, many of these applications including laser machining of curved structures, generation of curved plasma channels, guiding of electric discharges in a curved path, study of nonlinear propagation dynamics, and nonlinear interaction demand Airy beam with high power, energy, and wavelength tunability. Till date, none of the Airy beam sources have all these features in a single device. Here, we report a new class of coherent sources based on cubic phase modulation of a singly-resonant optical parametric oscillator (OPO), producing high-power, continuous-wave (cw), tunable radiation in 2-D Airy intensity profile existing over a length >2 m. Based on a MgO-doped periodically poled LiNbO<inf>3</inf> crystal pumped at 1064 nm, the Airy beam OPO produces output power more than 8 W, and wavelength tunability across 1.51-1.97 μm. This demonstration gives new direction for the development of sources of arbitrary structured beams at any wavelength, power, and energy in all time scales (cw to femtosecond).