This week’s Image of the week is taken from a recent JPhysB paper by researchers from Shunde Polytechnic, China, Texas A&M University at Qatar, Qatar and Xi’an Jiaotong University, China in which they study Airy-Bessel light bullets.  Light bullets are pulses of electromagnetic energy that can travel through a medium and keep their spatiotemporal shape, where diffraction and other effects would usually cause them to spread out.

Necklace-shaped patterns of the self-decelerating Airy-Bessel light bullets, from Wei-Ping Zhong et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 175401

Wei-Ping Zhong et al present self-decelerating Airy-Bessel light bullets as solutions of the 3D Schrödinger equation.  They show the behavior of the self-decelerating pulses of light with their profiles in time and space.  They find that they can take the form of disk-shaped rings, vortex rings, azimuthally-modulated rings, and necklace structures (as shown above).

Read more: Self-decelerating Airy-Bessel light bullets

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License

Front Image and article image: Necklace-shaped patterns of the self-decelerating Airy-Bessel light bullets, adapted from Wei-Ping Zhong et al 2015 J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 48 175401

Categories: Journal of Physics B: Atomic, Molecular and Optical Physics

Tags: Image of the week, Non-linear optics, Optics