Optical aberration-assisted three-dimensional manipulation of the focused spatiotemporal optical vortex

Spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs) with transverse orbital angular momentum in the spatiotemporal domain exhibit many intriguing characteristics and have attracted considerable attention. While current research on STOVs mainly focuses on the macroscopic scale, advancing to the micro-nano scale is crucial for fully unlocking their potential in applications such as nanophotonics, light-matter interaction, and information processing. Here, we present a method to achieve arbitrary three-dimensional shifting of highly confined STOVs within the focal region of a high numerical aperture objective lens by employing spherical aberration, x-tilt and y-tilt distortions. The spherical aberration induces a longitudinal shift of the focused STOV along the optical axis, while optical distortions give rise to lateral displacements within the focal region. Moreover, such distortions can also be exploited to generate multiple micro-nano-scale wave packets in the focal volume. Our results shed light on the utilization of optical aberrations to manipulate focused STOVs, exhibiting significant potential for expanding the application flexibility of STOVs in light-matter interaction. The manipulation of spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs) with transverse orbital angular momentum in the micro-nano scale is crucial for their applications in nanophotonics. The authors propose a method to achieve arbitrary three-dimensional shifting of highly confined STOVs, exploiting usually detrimental optical aberrations to manipulate focused STOVs.