Programmable spatiotemporal shaping for partially coherent structured wave packets
Abstract
Providing more coherent light with space-time coupling offers unprecedented opportunities across diverse scientific disciplines and areas of technology. However, in many applications, tailored laser beams with partial coherence in space and time are desired. Here, we demonstrate a programmable approach for simultaneously shaping the intensity and coherence distributions of spatiotemporally coupled partially coherent wave packets. By jointly engineering the fractal speckle of a dynamic scatterer and applying tailored modulation of the illumination function, we experimentally generate partially coherent laser beams with arbitrarily designed intensity and nontrivial coherence distributions. The proposed approach is compatible with ultrafast laser pulses, enabling the on-demand generation of partially coherent space-time wave packets. The resulting spatiotemporally partially coherent wave packets exhibit non-separable space-time intensity profiles together with engineered spatiotemporal correlation distributions. This work provides a versatile framework for tailoring partially coherent light in space and time, with varied applications in relativistic laser-matter interaction, passive imaging and optical manipulation.
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BibTeX
@misc{zhang2026programmable,
title = {{Programmable spatiotemporal shaping for partially coherent structured wave packets}},
author = {Zhao Zhang and Haihao Fan and Yaning Zhou and Weiran Li and Chaoliang Ding and Qiwen Zhan and Yangjian Cai and Xin Liu},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.16254},
eprint = {2610.16254},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16254},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Programmable spatiotemporal shaping for partially coherent structured wave packets
AU - Zhao Zhang
AU - Haihao Fan
AU - Yaning Zhou
AU - Weiran Li
AU - Chaoliang Ding
AU - Qiwen Zhan
AU - Yangjian Cai
AU - Xin Liu
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/12
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.16254
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.16254
AB - Providing more coherent light with space-time coupling offers unprecedented opportunities across diverse scientific disciplines and areas of technology. However, in many applications, tailored laser beams with partial coherence in space and time are desired. Here, we demonstrate a programmable approach for simultaneously shaping the intensity and coherence distributions of spatiotemporally coupled partially coherent wave packets. By jointly engineering the fractal speckle of a dynamic scatterer and applying tailored modulation of the illumination function, we experimentally generate partially coherent laser beams with arbitrarily designed intensity and nontrivial coherence distributions. The proposed approach is compatible with ultrafast laser pulses, enabling the on-demand generation of partially coherent space-time wave packets. The resulting spatiotemporally partially coherent wave packets exhibit non-separable space-time intensity profiles together with engineered spatiotemporal correlation distributions. This work provides a versatile framework for tailoring partially coherent light in space and time, with varied applications in relativistic laser-matter interaction, passive imaging and optical manipulation.
ER -