Generation of high-quality tunable Airy beams with an adaptive deformable mirror

Self-accelerating Airy beams have emerged to hold great promise in wide applications due to their non-diffraction and self-healing characteristics. The generation of Airy beams with high quality and high efficiency still remains challenging for conventional diffractive or refractive optical elements. In this Letter, tunable Airy beams with high quality are realized using a reflective adaptive deformable mirror (DM). Both the controllable cubic phase and the compensatory phase for aberrations of the optical system are generated simultaneously to ensure high quality of the resultant Airy beam. Continuous cubic phases with different amplitudes and rotation angles can be readily generated, demonstrating exceptional tunability of the generated Airy beams using a DM device. The intensity profiles and propagation trajectories of the experimentally generated Airy beams are in good agreement with the theoretical results. Benefiting from the intrinsic superiority of a DM with high reflectivity and a high damage threshold, our proposed method for dynamic generation of Airy beams opens up an avenue to plenty of applications such as ultrahigh-power laser shaping, laser fabrication, and optical manipulation.