Tailored accelerating beam profiles through a caustic-based approach to wavefront design

In this paper, the authors report a novel approach to generate arbitrary accelerating beam profiles. An inverse problem approach was applied to a caustic based description of the accelerating beam. Specifically, a beam propagating along x with a desired acceleration profile y(x) was considered. By treating y(x) as a caustic surface envelope of a family of tangential light rays, the inverse problem was solved allowing us to determine the appropriate wavefront phase law hence the phase function Φ(y) to be applied upon the phase modulator.