Experimental creation of programmable arbitrary spatiotemporal exotic beams

A device which generates arbitrary vector spatiotemporal beams in amplitude, phase, polarization and frequency/time was recently demonstrated. This device generates beams centered around 1550nm with 36nm of bandwidth and 0.1nm spectral resolution. This paper experimentally demonstrates high-order donut (toroidal) beam creation with arbitrarily definable geometric properties enabling any class of toroid to be created. Toroids have significant applications including light-matter interactions, long propagation stability when created as nondiffracting pulses and as information and energy carriers. In one configuration, we tailored light to simultaneously produce two 3D toroidal beams, with polarization diversity, with continuous phase wrapping about the poloidal direction (from outside to inside of the toroid). However, any distribution of amplitude, phase, polarization or frequency could be selected for these beams or any other beams within device limitations. Therefore, this all-in-one device enables all complex beam parameters to be rapidly adjusted, reprogrammed and iterated upon without any hardware changes.