Spatiotemporal Torquing of Light
S. W. Hancock, S. Zahedpour, A. Goffin, H. M. Milchberg
Abstract
We demonstrate the controlled spatiotemporal transfer of transverse orbital angular momentum (OAM) to electromagnetic waves: the spatiotemporal torquing of light. This is a radically different situation from OAM transfer to longitudinal, spatially defined OAM light by stationary or slowly varying refractive-index structures such as phase plates or air turbulence. We show that net transverse OAM per photon can be spatiotemporally imparted to a light pulse only if (1) a transient phase perturbation is well overlapped with the pulse in spacetime, or (2) the pulse initially has nonzero transverse OAM density, and the perturbation removes energy from it. Physical insight is provided by the mechanical analogy of torquing a wheel or removing mass as it spins. Our OAM theory for spatiotemporal optical vortex (STOV) pulses [S. W. Hancock ,] correctly quantifies the light-matter interaction of our experiments and provides a spatiotemporal-torque-based explanation for the first measurement of STOVs [N. Jhajj , ]. Published by the American Physical Society 2024