White-light hyperbolic Airy beams

Airy beams have gained attention due to their exotic properties of seemingly bending around obstacles, self-healing and being resistant to diffraction. Regular Airy beams are often generated by imposing cubic spatial phase on a Gaussian beam and Fourier transforming the resulting field with a lens. In this paper, we analyze the so-called hyperbolic Airy (HA) beams that are formed behind the cubic phase element, i.e. with no Fourier lens in the setup. We use an ultra-broadband supercontinuum laser source in combination with transmissive (refractive) and reflective cubic phase elements to create white-light HA beams. The resulting beams are sampled with a SEA TADPOLE spatial-spectral interferometer to record the hyperspectral beam profile and reconstruct a three-dimensional spatio-temporal impulse response of the cubic phase elements. We show that nondispersing beams are produced in reflective geometry, while the main lobe of the HA beam created with a refractive phase element suffered from lateral dispersion.