Spatiotemporal control of ultrafast pulses in multimode optical fibers

Multimode optical fibers represent the ideal platform for transferring multidimensional light states. However, dispersion degrades the correlations between the light’s degrees of freedom, thus limiting the effective transport of ultrashort pulses between distant nodes of optical networks. Here, we demonstrate that tailoring the spatiotemporal structure of ultrashort light pulses can overcome the physical limitations imposed by both chromatic and modal dispersion in multimode optical fibers. We synthesize these light states with predefined spatial and chromatic dynamics through applying a sequence of transformations to shape the optical field in all its dimensions. Similar methods can also be used to overcome dispersion processes in other physical settings like acoustics and electron optics. Our results will enable advancements in laser-based technologies, including multimode optical communications, imaging, ultrafast light-matter interactions, and high brightness fiber sources. The authors demonstrate mitigation of both chromatic and modal dispersion in multimode optical fibers via spatiotemporal tailoring of ultrashort light pulses. This holds potential for applications such as in multimode imaging, long-distance communications, ultrafast light-matter interactions, optical fiber amplifiers, and multidimensional information encoding.