Radially Self-Accelerating Optical Pulses

Abstract

We generalise the concept of radially self-accelerating beams, to the domain of optical pulses. In particular, we show, how radially self-accelerating optical pulses (RSAPs) can be constructed by suitable superpositions of X-waves, which are a natural extension of Bessel beams in the pulsed domain. Moreover, we show, that while field rotating RSAPs preserve their self-acceleration character, intensity rotating RSAPs only possess pseudo self-acceleration, as their transverse intensity distribution is deformed during propagation, due to their propagation-dependent angular velocity.