Ayman F. Abouraddy
University of Central Florida
Abstract: Exercising control over the spatial degrees of freedom of the optical field has continued to yield breakthroughs over the past few decades, ranging from the discovery of Bessel beams and beams endowed with orbital angular momentum, to optical tweezers and traps, and the manipulation of the field in multimode optical fibers. Separately, put in parallel with these efforts, ultrafast pulse shaping has revolutionized our control over the temporal degree of freedom of the optical field. The spatial and temporal realms in optics have led for the most part independent lives with few examples of creative intersections. In this talk I show that precise, joint sculpting of the spatial and temporal degrees of freedom of optical fields – rather than modulating each independently – yields a new class of pulsed beams that I call 'space-time' (ST) wave packets. Surprising and useful optical behavior are exhibited by ST wave packets when freely propagating or when interacting with photonic devices, leading to a new frontier for the study of structured light. I will share our recent experimental and theoretical results from this rapidly emerging topic and sketch potential applications that could benefit from ST wave packets.