3D-printed fiber-based zeroth- and high-order Bessel beam generator

Abstract

Bessel beams (BBs) have gained prominence thanks to their diffraction-free propagation and self-healing properties. These beams are conventionally generated using different approaches, namely by transforming a narrow circular beam with a lens, using axicons or holographic beam-shaping techniques. These methods involve space-consuming optics. To overcome this limitation, in the past, efforts have been made to create BBs directly from optical fibers. However, these solutions have limited capability to generate BBs with on-demand optical parameters and only focused on creating zeroth-order BBs. Here, we propose a photonic structure that uses stacked miniaturized optical elements 3D printed in a single step on the fiber facet. Our design allows for the generation of both zeroth- and high-order BBs and fully controllable tailoring of the beams’ parameters, such as their diffraction-free propagation distance or the width of their central peak or node. Remarkably, we report for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the generation of high-order BBs from optical fibers. We expect our approach to be useful in applications such as optical and quantum communications, fiber-based sensors, microscopy, spectroscopy, and optical trapping.