Optimal compression and energy confinement of optical Airy bullets

We report on an approach to generate non-diffractive and non-dispersive Airy(3) bullets with enhanced spatio-temporal energy confinement. By appropriately reshaping the initial spectral components in the Fourier domain, the resulting optical bullets show a significant enhancement of their central lobe intensity while exhibiting a reduced spatio-temporal outspread of the surrounding sub-lobes - typical of Airy(3) bullets. Numerically, we demonstrate that when propagating in dispersive media within a linear regime, such optimized Airy3 bullets maintain the peculiar properties of their standard counterparts, including curved trajectories, non-spreading features and self-healing. We foresee direct applications in novel and non-disruptive optical techniques for imaging, tomography and spatio-temporally resolved spectroscopy. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America