On November 15, 2012, the paper Virtual source for an Airy beam written by Yan Shaohui and Yao Baoli with Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics of CAS (XIOPM) was published in the latest Optics Letters of the Optical Society of America (OSA), which was accepted only 8 days after its submission. It was rare in usual refereeing of academic journal and broke the time record of any paper published in foreign famous periodicals by XIOPM.

Airy beam, with the acceleration and nondiffracting as the characteristics, has potential application prospect in fields of optical trapping, particles manipulation and new optical imaging technology. Most researches in the international community focus on paraxial Airy beam while the nonparaxial Airy beam has no mature theory for describing it. Through deep study, Yan Shaohui and other researchers solved the problem theoretically for the first time. They mathematically found the virtual source generating Airy beam and though integrating the virtual source they got common paraxial Airy beam and the second-order corrections to nonparaxial beam can be determined, which provided significant theory basis for complete and accurate description of Airy beam and its transmission characteristic. The reviewer with Optics Letters commented: “The authors obtain the important Eq.(26) to get the solution for Airy light beam and it's nonparaxial corrections…, I recommend publishing this paper in the present form.”
Dr. Yan Shaohui, associate researcher with State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics of XIOPM, was enrolled in 2005 and taught by researcher Yao Baoli. He stayed in the institute after finishing PhD program in 2009, concentrating on vectorial beam and optical trapping, both of which are the frontier theoretical topics in fields of optics and fields. After 7-year painstaking research, Dr. Yan Shaohui has obtained series of research achievements and published more than ten papers in international famous periodicals, including PRL, PRA, OL, OE and so on. He won Excellent Doctoral Dissertation, CAS 2011 and is a member of Youth Innovation Promotion Association, CAS and XIOPM.