Measurement of the Superluminal Group Velocity of an Ultrashort Bessel Beam Pulse (original) (raw)
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In a recent article [R. R. Alfano and D. A. Nolan, Opt. Commun. 361 (2016) 25] the group velocity reduction below the speed of light in the case of certain Bessel beam pulses has been considered and an idea of its application for a natural optical buffer presented. However, the authors treat the problem as if only one type of Bessel pulse existed, no matter how it is generated. The deficiencies of the article stem from not being familiar with an extensive literature on Bessel pulses, in particular, with a couple of papers published much earlier in the J. Opt. Soc. Am. A, which have studied exactly the same problem more thoroughly.
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Recently a series of theoretical and experimental papers on free-space propagation of pulsed Laguerre-Gaussian and Bessel beams was published, which reached contradictory and controversial results about group velocities of such pulses. Depending on the measurement scheme, the group velocity can be defined differently. We analyze how different versions of group velocity are related to the measurable travel time (time of flight) of the pulse between input (source) and output (detecting) planes. The analysis is tested on a theoretical model-the Bessel-Gauss pulse whose propagation path exhibits both subluminal and superluminal regions. Our main conclusion from resolving the contradictions in the literature is that different versions of group velocity are appropriate, depending on whether or not the beam is hollow and how the pulse is recorded in the output plane-integrally or with spatial resolution.
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