Recently a plethora of optical beams with non trivial amplitude and phase distributions have been introduced. In a collection containing only the, classical now, Bessel beams an increasing number of new members like the Airy and the radially symmetrical Airy, Mathieu and Weber beams have been added.
These novel optical beams propagate in curved trajectories and resist to diffraction or dispersion. Therefore, they are able to self-heal and bypass obstacles, advantages that make them exiting for applications ranging from materials processing to telecommunications.
On the other hand, the generation of these wavepackets is not trivial. Their complexity challenges our current state of the art techniques for wavefront shaping, and has urged us to exploit, among others, unconventional approaches like the use of optical aberrations.
The talk will focus on the exciting ongoing quest of materializing these novel optical wavepackets at higher intensities and boarder spectral range, and their usage to generate tailored filaments, light bullets, abruptly auto focusing waves and telecommunication links.