Speaker
Description
Structured light - light whose spatial and temporal profiles may be simultaneously tailored - offers new capabilities for controlling all degrees of freedom of an optical field and therefore its interaction with matter. Achieving such control requires tunable spatiotemporal spectra.
Separately, Thomson scattering is a known process in which the collision of energetic particle bunches and intense laser beams results in short bursts of high frequency radiation. This allows for the control of the temporal degree of freedom of the resulting radiation.
In this talk, we present a generalised Thomson scattering formalism that also enables the accurate control of the spatial structured of the emitted radiation. This approach allows the generation of arbitrarily structured light pulses from the interaction of relativistic particle bunches with intense structured lasers. As a concrete example, we use this approach to convert orbital angular momentum (OAM) of the driver laser into transverse optical angular momentum (TOAM) in the radiation field, thereby creating spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOV) in Thomson scattering experiments. This framework opens a new path toward generating structured high-frequency light with full spatiotemporal control.
