Sculpturing light pulses spatiotemporally with sophisticated controls of various degrees of freedom is one of the powerful tools for material interrogations and manipulations, as well as information transmission and processing. Even though exotic light fields are part of Maxwell’s solutions or wave equation’s eigenmodes, their presence and richness still surprise us with new or renewed physical insights and understandings. Also, the diversity of the modes and states of such light fields has inspired us to pursue their potential new applications, from information technologies to light-based sensing and imaging. In this talk, I will briefly review the recent progress in spatiotemporal light fields and then focus on our recent experimental efforts to generate, manipulate, and characterize such light pulses from strong-field (or high-field) to single photon levels.
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