Airy beams beyond the paraxial approximation

The behavior of the vectorial Airy beams beyond the paraxial approximation is investigated. Indeed, closed-form (even though non exact) expressions for the electric components of the fields generated by the same boundary conditions, which should pertain to the scalar Airy beams, are obtained on the basis of the vectorial Rayleigh-Sommerfeld diffraction integrals under suitable approximations. Such expressions may accompany more complete approaches, like that in Opt. Expr. 17, 22432 (2009), where a fully numerical analysis of the propagation of exponentially smoothed Airy beams has been presented, faithfully reproducing the conditions of their experimental demonstration as reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 213907 (2007). Comments on other well known approaches to the investigation of the nonparaxial propagation of definite paraxial beams are also given. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.