| Summary: | We demonstrate optical sharply bending beams under the paraxial condition. The curved path followed by these beams arises from the intersection of geometrical rays nearly parallel to the optical axis rather than the envelope of a bundle of tangential rays, whereby conventional bending beams were routinely designed. Compared with Airy beams, such sharply bending beams can turn at a much larger angle, and, surprisingly, exhibit an expedited self-healing process especially when they encounter an obstacle farther away. Furthermore, a simple method to preset the beam path is put forward, leading to free-space active routing of laser peak intensity even to 90° along circular and elliptical trajectories of macroscale. Our approach can be exploited to design sharply curved wave-packets in other physical systems.
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