Spatiotemporal sculpturing of light: a tutorial

Abstract

Spatiotemporal sculpturing of light pulses with sophisticated structures on demand is one major goal of the everlasting pursuit of ultrafast information transmission and processing as well as ultraintense energy concentration and extraction using light. It may hold the key to unlocking new extraordinary fundamental physical effects. Traditionally, spatiotemporal light pulses are treated as spatiotemporally separable wave packets as a solution to Maxwell’s equations. In the past decade, more generalized forms of spatiotemporally nonseparable solution started to emerge with growing importance for their striking physical effects. This tutorial intends to provide the necessary basics on how to sculpture light in the spatiotemporal domain to realize spatiotemporal structures on demand and highlight some of the recent advances in the creation and characterization of increasingly complex spatiotemporal wave packets. These spatiotemporally separable to complex nonseparable states with diverse geometric and topological structures exhibit unique physical properties during propagation, focusing, and interaction with matter. The broad potential applications as well as outlook and future trends and open challenges in this field are presented.