Nonparaxial shape-preserving Airy beams with Bessel signature.

Spatially accelerating beams that are solutions to Maxwell equations may propagate along incomplete circular trajectories. Taking these truncated Bessel fields to the paraxial limit, some authors have sustained that it has recovered the known Airy beams (AiBs). Based on the angular spectrum representation of optical fields, we demonstrated that the paraxial approximation rigorously leads to off-axis focused beams instead of finite-energy AiBs. The latter will arise under the umbrella of a nonparaxial approach following elliptical trajectories in place of parabolas. The analytical expression of such a shape-preserving wave field under Gaussian apodization is disclosed by using third-order nonparaxial coefficients. Deviations from full-wave simulations appear more severely in beam positioning rather than its local profile.