Minhui Xiong’s research while affiliated with University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and other places

Topological structures reveal the hidden secrets and beauty in nature, such as the double helix in DNA, whilst, the manipulation of which in physical fields, especially in ultrafast structured light, draw booming attention. Here we introduce a new family of spatiotemporal light fields, i.e. helical pulses, carrying sophisticated double-helix singularities in its electromagnetic topological structures. The helical pulses were solved from Maxwell’s equation as chiral extensions of toroidal light pulses but with controlled angular momentum dependence. We unveil that the double helix singularities can maintain their topological invariance during propagation and the field exhibits paired generation and annihilation of vortices and antivortices in ultrafast space-time, so as to be potential information carriers beating previous conventional vortex structured light.

Topological structures reveal the hidden secrets and beauty in nature, such as the double helix in DNA, whilst, the manipula-tion of which in physical fields, especially in ultrafast struc-tured light, draw booming attention. Here we introduce a new family of spatiotemporal light fields, i.e. helical pulses, carry-ing sophisticated double-helix singularities in its electromag-netic topological structures. The helical pulses were solved from Maxwell's equation as chiral extensions of toroidal light pulses but with controlled angular momentum dependence. We unveil that the double helix singularities can maintain their topological invariance during propagation and the field exhibits paired generation and annihilation of vortices and antivortices in ultrafast space-time, so as to be potential information carriers beating previous conventional vortex structured light.

In structured light with controllable degrees of freedom (DoFs), the vortex beams carrying orbital angular momentum (OAM) give access to provide additional degrees of freedom for information transfer, and in classic field, the propagation invariant space time electromagnetic pulses are the possible approach to high dimensional states. This paper arose an idea that coupling the space polarization nonseparable states of vortex beams and space time nonseparable states of spatiotemporal pulse can generate numerous unique and beneficial effects. Here, we introduce an family of space time nonseparable electromagnetic vortices (STNEV). The pulses exhibit complex and robust spatiotemporal topological structure of the electromagnetic fields, multiple singularities in the Poynting vector maps and distributions of energy backflow. We apply a quantum-mechanics methodology for quantitatively characterizing space time nonseparability of the pulse. Our findings facilitate their applications in fields of information transfer, toroidal electrodynamics and inducing transient excitations in matter.