Abruptly Focusing and Defocusing Needles of Light and Closed-Form Electromagnetic Wavepackets

Fourier optics enforces a trade-off between length and narrowness in electromagnetic wavepackets, so that a narrow spatial focus diffracts at a large divergence angle, and only infinitely wide beams can remain nondiffracting. We show that it is possible to bypass this trade-off between the length and the narrowness of intensity hotspots and find a family of electromagnetic wavepackets that abruptly focus to and defocus from high-intensity regions of any aspect ratio. Such features are potentially useful in scenarios where one would like to avoid damaging the surrounding environment, for instance, to target tumors very precisely in cancer treatment, drill holes of very precise dimensions in laser machining, or trigger nonlinear processes in a well-defined region. In the process, we also construct the first closed-form solutions to Maxwell’s equations for finite-energy electromagnetic pulses. These pulses also exhibit intriguing physics, with an on-axis intensity peak that always travels at the speed of light despite inherent diffraction.