1D Self-Healing Beams in Integrated Silicon Photonics

Since the first experimental observation of optical Airy beams, various applications ranging from particle and cell micromanipulation to laser micromachining have exploited their nondiffracting and accelerating properties. The later discovery that Airy beams can self-heal after being blocked by an obstacle further proved their robustness to propagate under a scattering and disordered environment. Here, we report the generation of an Airy-like accelerating beam on an integrated silicon photonic chip and demonstrate that the on-chip 1D Airy-like accelerating beams preserve the same properties as the 2D Airy beams. The 1D synthetic-phase meta-optics used to create the accelerating beam has the size of only 3 mu m x 16 mu m, at least 3 orders of magnitude smaller than the conventional optic. The on-chip self-healing beams demonstrated here could potentially enable diffraction-free light routing for on-chip optical networks and high-precision micromanipulation of biomolecules on an integrated photonic chip.