Probing Internal Dynamics of Spatiotemporal Optical Vortex Strings: Spatiotemporal Attraction and Filament Stretching

Abstract: Vortex dynamics are intriguing and challenging across multiple physics fields. In optics, customized spatiotemporally structured optical fields, especially spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOV), offer the potential to tailor light via coupled space-time degrees of freedom. However, the interaction mechanisms between multiple transverse orbital angular momentum singularities within a single wave packet remain elusive. This study explores the intrinsic dynamics of a STOV with three phase singularities, observing a pronounced vortex singularity oscillation phenomena by tuning the temporal dispersion. We show that these phenomena originate from the counterintuitive spatiotemporal attractive effect between vortices, which is closely related to the singularity distance. Furthermore, the stretching into filaments and annihilation behaviors is observed by introducing antivortex in the center of the wavepacket. Experimentally, we propose a Full Interferometric Retrieval of Spatiotemporal Tomography (FIRST) method that enables the complete, single-shot capture of wave packets, with excellent agreement between theoretical predictions and experimental results. To the best of our knowledge, the dynamics of transverse spatiotemporal singularities within a single wave packet are reported here for the first time. These findings confirm the existence of interesting interactions between STOV singularities, deepen our understanding of photonics and open a new direction for investigating the complex dynamics of vortex singularities in the spatiotemporal domain.