Roadmap on multimode light shaping

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of multimode light shaping, emphasizing its fundamental principles, diverse applications, and future directions across various optical research fields.

Contribution

It unifies different multimode light techniques, highlighting their common roots and potential for inspiring innovative approaches in structured light research.

Findings

Multimode light shaping spans spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal domains.

Applications include classical and quantum light generation, microscopy, and communication.

The roadmap identifies future research directions and interdisciplinary links.

Abstract

Our ability to generate new distributions of light has been remarkably enhanced in recent years. At the most fundamental level, these light patterns are obtained by ingeniously combining different electromagnetic modes. Interestingly, the modal superposition occurs in the spatial, temporal as well as spatio-temporal domain. This generalized concept of structured light is being applied across the entire spectrum of optics: generating classical and quantum states of light, harnessing linear and nonlinear light-matter interactions, and advancing applications in microscopy, spectroscopy, holography, communication, and synchronization. This Roadmap highlights the common roots of these different techniques and thus establishes links between research areas that complement each other seamlessly. We provide an overview of all these areas, their backgrounds, current research, and future developments. We highlight the power of multimodal light manipulation and want to inspire new eclectic approaches in this vibrant research community.