Supertoroidal light pulses as electromagnetic skyrmions propagating in free space.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 34625539.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-021-26037-w and PMC identifier 8501108.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Topological complex transient electromagnetic fields give access to nontrivial light-matter interactions and provide additional degrees of freedom for information transfer. An important example of such electromagnetic excitations are space-time non-separable single-cycle pulses of toroidal topology, the exact solutions of Maxwell's equations described by Hellwarth and Nouchi in 1996 and recently observed experimentally. Here we introduce an extended family of electromagnetic excitation, the supertoroidal electromagnetic pulses, in which the Hellwarth-Nouchi pulse is just the simplest member. The supertoroidal pulses exhibit skyrmionic structure of the electromagnetic fields, multiple singularities in the Poynting vector maps and fractal-like distributions of energy backflow. They are of interest for transient light-matter interactions, ultrafast optics, spectroscopy, and toroidal electrodynamics.