The taming of absorption: generating a constant intensity beam in a lossy medium.

We report the first observation (to our best knowledge) of a constant intensity, quasi-Bessel/nondiffracting beam in an absorbing medium generated by a novel optical element, "exicon," or exponential intensity axicon. Such absorption-compensated and diffraction-resistant beams can find applications in illumination, remote sensing, free-space communications, imaging in biological tissues, nonlinear optics, and other situations where absorption and diffraction hinder light propagation.