Speaker
Description
The increasing ability to control the spatial, temporal and polarization structure of ultrashort laser pulses opens new possibilities for tailoring light–matter interactions beyond the conventional Gaussian pulse. Orbital angular momentum, vector beams and spatio-temporal couplings can be used not simply to modify the focal intensity distribution, but to control the topology, velocity and angular momentum of the fields that drive a plasma. These developments are beginning to provide new handles on phenomena ranging from high-harmonic generation to plasma waves, particle acceleration and kinetic plasma dynamics.
In this talk I will review our recent work at the VOXEL laboratory at Instituto Superior Técnico on the generation, characterization and application of structured ultrashort light. I will discuss the control of high-harmonic wavefronts and orbital angular momentum, including the use of diffractive optics to structure EUV radiation, and our first experiments with spatio-temporal “light springs”, where orbital angular momentum is encoded across the spectrum of an ultrashort pulse.
Finally, I will give some perspectives on the ongoing evolution of the VOXEL laboratory and the new experimental capabilities it will enable.