Spatiotemporal sculpturing of light pulses with sophisticated structures on demand is one major goal of the everlasting pursuit of ultrafast information transmission and processing as well as ultraintense energy concentration and extraction using light. It may hold the key to unlocking new extraordinary fundamental physical effects. Traditionally, spatiotemporal light pulses are treated as spatiotemporally separable wave packets as a solution to Maxwell’s equations. In the past decade, more generalized forms of spatiotemporally nonseparable solution started to emerge with growing importance for their striking physical effects. This tutorial intends to provide the necessary basics on how to sculpture light in the spatiotemporal domain to realize spatiotemporal structures on demand and highlight some of the recent advances in the creation and characterization of increasingly complex spatiotemporal wave packets. These spatiotemporally separable to complex nonseparable states with diverse geometric and topological structures exhibit unique physical properties during propagation, focusing, and interaction with matter. The broad potential applications as well as outlook and future trends and open challenges in this field are presented.

中文翻译：

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光的时空雕塑：教程

按需对具有复杂结构的光脉冲进行时空雕刻是对超快信息传输和处理以及利用光的超强能量集中和提取的永恒追求的主要目标之一。它可能是解锁新的非凡基本物理效应的关键。传统上，时空光脉冲被视为时空可分离的波包，作为麦克斯韦方程组的解。在过去的十年中，更普遍形式的时空不可分离的解决方案开始出现，其惊人的物理效应变得越来越重要。本教程旨在提供有关如何在时空域中雕刻光以按需实现时空结构的必要基础知识，并重点介绍在日益复杂的时空波包的创建和表征方面的一些最新进展。这些时空可分离到复杂的不可分离状态具有不同的几何和拓扑结构，在传播、聚焦和与物质相互作用过程中表现出独特的物理性质。介绍了该领域广泛的潜在应用以及前景和未来趋势以及开放挑战。