We are at an inflection point in our control of light,beyond 2D transverse intensity patterns and towards tailored light in space and time,for complete 4D control.When new degrees of freedom are added to the mix,the p...We are at an inflection point in our control of light,beyond 2D transverse intensity patterns and towards tailored light in space and time,for complete 4D control.When new degrees of freedom are added to the mix,the potential is enormous.It is novel spatiotemporal optical wavepackets that are lighting the way to this exciting future.Controlling light can be traced back thousands of years,with stories of directing sunlight from mirrors to burn attacking ships,an early form of incoherent light shaping[1].In this example,when light is added to light,the outcome is proportionally more light.This paradigm is broken when the light can be treated as coherent waves:light added to light can result in darkness.Thomas Young did exactly this to create spatial intensity structure in the form of“fringes”.Moving beyond just two displaced splits,his notion of fringes can be generalized to any geometry and any degree of freedom[2].His experiment revealed just how easy it is to control the spatial structure of light by simply adding plane waves,initially in the transverse plane for 2D structured light in intensity,but now in more abstract degrees of freedom of light[3].展开更多
文摘We are at an inflection point in our control of light,beyond 2D transverse intensity patterns and towards tailored light in space and time,for complete 4D control.When new degrees of freedom are added to the mix,the potential is enormous.It is novel spatiotemporal optical wavepackets that are lighting the way to this exciting future.Controlling light can be traced back thousands of years,with stories of directing sunlight from mirrors to burn attacking ships,an early form of incoherent light shaping[1].In this example,when light is added to light,the outcome is proportionally more light.This paradigm is broken when the light can be treated as coherent waves:light added to light can result in darkness.Thomas Young did exactly this to create spatial intensity structure in the form of“fringes”.Moving beyond just two displaced splits,his notion of fringes can be generalized to any geometry and any degree of freedom[2].His experiment revealed just how easy it is to control the spatial structure of light by simply adding plane waves,initially in the transverse plane for 2D structured light in intensity,but now in more abstract degrees of freedom of light[3].
