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- Title
Subwavelength anti-diffracting beams propagating over more than 1,000 Rayleigh lengths.
- Authors
DelRe, Eugenio; Di Mei, Fabrizio; Parravicini, Jacopo; Parravicini, Gianbattista; Agranat, Aharon J.; Conti, Claudio
- Abstract
Propagating light beams with widths down to and below the optical wavelength require bulky large-aperture lenses and remain focused only for micrometric distances. Here, we report the observation of light beams that violate this localization/depth-of-focus law by shrinking as they propagate, allowing resolution to be maintained and increased over macroscopic propagation lengths. In nanodisordered ferroelectrics we observe a non-paraxial propagation of a sub-micrometre-sized beam for over 1,000 diffraction lengths, the narrowest visible beam reported to date. This unprecedented effect is caused by the nonlinear response of a dipolar glass, which transforms the leading optical wave equation into a Klein-Gordon-type equation that describes a massive particle field. Our findings open the way to high-resolution optics over large depths of focus, and a route to merging bulk optics into nanodevices.
- Subjects
LIGHT propagation; WAVELENGTHS; RAYLEIGH scattering; DIFFRACTION patterns; KLEIN-Gordon equation; METAMATERIALS; LIGHT transmission
- Publication
Nature Photonics, 2015, Vol 9, Issue 4, p228
- ISSN
1749-4885
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1038/nphoton.2015.21