Natural focusing of symmetric Airy beams

Abstract

In this work we study the natural focusing of Airy beams symmetric under reflection of the transverse coordinates. Following a recent proposal, their angular spectra depend on the absolute value of the third power of the transverse components of the wave vector. We show that these beams are related to Airy and Scorer special functions. The caustics have a morphology that does not correspond to the ones described by standard catastrophe optics. The structural stability of symmetric Airy beams is experimentally probed