Spatiotemporal Light Modes: From Elegant Vortices to Vortex‐Antivortex Patterns

ABSTRACT Spatiotemporal wave packets with nontrivial topologies, such as vortices, have recently attracted sustained interest from the optical community. Identifying the simplest vortex modes is instrumental to design high‐dimensional structured light fields and to gain insight into the physics of complex optical dynamics. Herein, we theoretically propose and experimentally demonstrate two families of spatiotemporal light vortices that are exact solutions to the time‐dependent wave equation across diverse dispersion regimes. The envelopes of these wave packets, which can be expressed in closed forms, exhibit nontrivial complex field structures and distinct transverse orbital angular momentum patterns. The discovered space‐time modes exhibit vortices and antivortices arising from their intrinsic energy density flow that reveals their fundamental characteristics and points to potential applications. The preparation of such intriguing spatiotemporal light states holds significant promise for applications in high‐dimensional quantum and classical entanglement, novel photonic topological textures, as well as high‐capacity communications and nonlinear optical interactions.