Abstract
Spatiotemporal optical vortices (STOVs) with transverse orbital angular momentum in the spatiotemporal domain exhibit many intriguing characteristics and have attracted considerable attention. While current research on STOVs mainly focuses on the macroscopic scale, advancing to the micro-nano scale is crucial for fully unlocking their potential in applications such as nanophotonics, light-matter interaction, and information processing. Here, we present a method to achieve arbitrary three-dimensional shifting of highly confined STOVs within the focal region of a high numerical aperture objective lens by employing spherical aberration, x-tilt and y-tilt distortions. The spherical aberration induces a longitudinal shift of the focused STOV along the optical axis, while optical distortions give rise to lateral displacements within the focal region. Moreover, such distortions can also be exploited to generate multiple micro-nano-scale wave packets in the focal volume. Our results shed light on the utilization of optical aberrations to manipulate focused STOVs, exhibiting significant potential for expanding the application flexibility of STOVs in light-matter interaction.
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Data availability
Data generated in this study are provided in the Supplementary Data file. The data that supports the findings of this study are also available from the corresponding author upon request.
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All codes used during the current work are available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (12274299); Shanghai Pujiang Program (25PJA105).
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J.C. conceived the idea. T.L. and Y.L. performed the simulations and the calculations. T.L. wrote the manuscript and analyzed the experimental data with J.C. J.C. supervised the overall project. All authors participated in the discussion, revision, and approved the final version of the manuscript.
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Liu, T., Liu, Y. & Chen, J. Optical aberration-assisted three-dimensional manipulation of the focused spatiotemporal optical vortex. Commun Phys (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-026-02548-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-026-02548-0
