Spatiotemporal vectorial structured light that dynamically varies on higher-order Poincaré sphere

Abstract

Higher-order structured light beams, including optical vortex (OV) beams and vector beams, which can be geometrically represented as points on higher-order Poincaré spheres (HOPSs), have been widely exploited in applications such as optical trapping, optical communications, optical metrology, quantum optics, to name a few. To date, traditional approaches to producing such higher-order structured light beams deal with controllable generation of different static points on HOPS. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate the generation of spatiotemporal structured light beams that dynamically vary on HOPS. By superposing OV beams with different frequencies, spatiotemporal vectorial structured light beams that dynamically vary along latitude lines, meridians, and other trajectories on the first order Poincaré sphere are generated in simulation. Our work may give new insight into arbitrarily and ultrafast tailoring higher-order structured light beams.