Vectorial sculpturing of spatiotemporal wavepackets

Abstract

Spatiotemporal vectorial pulse shaping can produce ultrafast optical pulses that enable unprecedented coherent control for light–matter interactions. A traditional pulse shaper produces ultrafast pulses with scalar programmable waveforms for various quantum control applications. However, quantum systems are three dimensional in nature; thus, the interactions are inevitability vectorial. Existing polarization pulse shaping techniques, which are often difficult to align and cumbersome to handle, can only produce dynamic polarization modulation in the temporal domain. Through simply introducing a quarter-wave plate in a pulse shaper using a two-dimensional spatial light modulator, we show that wavepackets with much more sophisticated spatiotemporal vectorial structures such as spatiotemporal spin grating, spatiotemporal spin lattice, and spatiotemporally twisting polarization can be generated, significantly expanding our ability in coherently controlling light–matter interactions that may find broad applications.