Self-accelerating beams in photonic crystals

We find accelerating beams in a general periodic optical system, such as photonic crystal slabs, honeycomb lattices, and various metamaterials. These beams retain a shape-preserving profile while bending to highly non-paraxial angles along a circular-like trajectory. The properties of such beams depend on the crystal lattice structure: on a small-scale, the fine features of the beams profile are uniquely derived from the exact structure of the crystalline cells, while on a large-scale the beam only depends on the periodicity of the lattice, asymptotically reaching the free-space analytic solutions when the wavelength is much larger than the cell size. We demonstrate such beams in a 2D Kronig-Penney separable model, but our methodology of finding such solutions is general, predicting accelerating beams in any periodic structure. This highlights how light can be guided through a general system by only tailoring the incoming field, without altering the structure itself. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America