Accelerating regular polygon beams

Beams that possess high-intensity peaks that follow curved paths of propagation under linear diffraction have recently been shown to have a multitude of interesting uses. In this Letter, a family of phase-only masks is derived, and each mask gives rise to multiple accelerating intensity maxima. The curved paths of the peaks can be described by the vertices of a regular polygon that is centered on the optic axis and expands with propagation. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America