Investigating group-velocity-tunable propagation-invariant optical wave-packets

The group-velocity of the propagation-invariant optical wave-packet generated by the conical superposition can be controlled by introducing well-designed arbitrarily-axisymmetric pulse-front deformation, which permits realizing superluminal, subluminal, accelerating, decelerating, and even nearly-programmable group-velocities. To better understand the tunability of the group-velocity, the generation methods of this propagation-invariant optical wave-packet and the mechanisms of the tunable group-velocity in both the physical and Fourier spaces are investigated. We also have studied the relationship with the recently-reported space–time wave-packet, and this group-velocity-tunable propagation-invariant optical wave-packet should be a subset of the space–time wave-packet.