Propagation and power flow of high-order three-Airy beams

We demonstrate experimentally propagation and evolution of high-order three-Airy beams in this letter. Our results show clearly that, a high-order three-Airy beam tends to evolve into a Laguerre-Gaussian-like beam, in consistence with previous prediction. Moreover, by analyzing the internal transverse power flow of three-Airy beams during propagation, we found that, as the order of three-Airy beams goes higher, the initial beam intensity distributes more in the “side lobes”, and it takes longer propagation for the beams to reach a maximum peak intensity and then transform into patterns of corresponding Laguerre-Gaussian-like modes.