From advanced plasma-based accelerators to superradiant light sources with arbitrarily structured light

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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. In this talk, I present a comprehensive framework for structured light, encompassing theory, numerical modelling, and experimental work.

First, I derive methods for accurately controlling the focal trajectory of wave packets and outline a numerical framework for injecting arbitrary structured light into FDTD codes. Next, I explore the generation of spatiotemporally structured radiation through laser-plasma interactions.


To this end, I introduce a generalised Thomson scattering formalism that enables the design of experiments for creating tailored spatiotemporal pulses. Finally, I present experimental and simulation results regarding "light springs", demonstrating their synthesis and spectral measurements, as well as their application in tuning orbital group velocity for plasma super-radiance.