Causality effects on accelerating light pulses

We study accelerating and decelerating shape-preserving temporal Airy wave-packets propagating in dispersive media. We explore the effects of causality, and find that, whereas decelerating pulses can asymptotically reach zero group velocity, pulses that accelerate towards infinite group velocity inevitably break up, after a specific critical point. The trajectories and the features of causal pulses are analyzed, along with the requirements for the existence of the critical point and experimental schemes for its observation. Finally, we show that causality imposes similar effects on accelerating pulses in the presence of local Kerr-like nonlinearities. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America