Spatiotemporal control of light (Tutorial)

This tutorial investigates various techniques for spatial and/or temporal optical beam manipulation.

A look at the different ways, experimentalists can take a beam, or set of beams as an input, and then transform those beams or beams into the desired spatial and/or temporal outputs. Topics covered include single-phase mask and multiple-phase masks techniques for spatial transformation, as well as techniques in spectral pulse shaping.

0:00 Introduction and outline
5:10 Free-space coupling between single-mode fibres using lenses
10:00 Lossless linear transformations preserve overlaps
11:36 Why you can't create a linear system which couples two inputs modes onto the same output mode.
14:53 Coupling between a pair of input and output spatial modes using a single phase mask
17:10 Why single phase mask approaches will in general incur loss
19:10 Trading off coupling efficiency for modal purity using a single phase mask.
21:30 Lossless coupling between a pair of input and output spatial modes using multiple phase masks
23:40 N modes in, to N modes out systems using multiple phase masks (multi-plane light conversion, MPLC)
29:20 Wavefront matching algorithm for inverse design
32:10 Laguerre-Gaussian mode sorter
35:56 1D-to-2D spatial transformation
37:20 Temporal control (spectral pulse shaping)
41:50 Arbitrary spatiotemporal beam shaping (creating a beam which has any value at any point in spacetime)