Have you ever played with a spring toy? Well, light can also be shaped like a spring, according to the latest research from an international team of scientists led by Marco Piccardo. The team used ultrafast optics and structured light to synthesize a new family of spatiotemporal light beams, known as light springs. This discovery has the potential to revolutionize applications in photonics with complex light. The new beams are ideal for time-resolved microscopy, laser-plasma acceleration, free-space optical communications and much more. The results were published in the prestigious journal Nature Photonics.
With pulse shaping, scientists separate colored laser pulses, each of which can be manipulated and recombined to produce a new laser pulse. With wavefront shaping, light can be given a spatial structure. The team behind the light springs project combined these methods to shape light simultaneously in space and time. Instead of conventional shapers that separate colors along a strip, the researchers used a special diffraction grating with circular symmetry to create a round rainbow of colors. The team also developed a powerful, hyperspectral holography reconstruction technique to provide the complete tomography of the complex spatiotemporal structures of the broadband nature of the new light beams.
The team’s space-time shaper produces a family of light beams that evolve on an ultrashort femtosecond timescale with a twisted and widely tailorable light structure. The team demonstrated the unprecedented control enabled by their space-time shaper by tailoring various properties of the light springs. The light springs dancing together in space and time showcased the exciting physics the team has discovered. The researchers believe their technique promises to lead to a whole new generation of compact accelerators and light sources in plasma.
More information:
Marco Piccardo et al, Broadband control of topological–spectral correlations in space–time beams, Nature Photonics (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41566-023-01223-y
Provided by Técnico Lisboa
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Ultrashort light pulses shaped like a spring toy bring a new twist to photonics (2023, June 9)
retrieved 9 June 2023 from https://phys.org/news/2023-06-ultrashort-pulses-toy-photonics.html
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