Spatiotemporal sculpturing of light pulse with ultimately sophisticated
structures represents the holy grail of the human everlasting pursue of
ultrafast information transmission and processing as well as ultra-intense
energy concentration and extraction. It also holds the key to unlock new
extraordinary fundamental physical effects. Traditionally, spatiotemporal light
pulses are always treated as spatiotemporally separable wave packet as solution
of the Maxwell's equations. In the past decade, however, more generalized forms
of spatiotemporally nonseparable solution started to emerge with growing
importance for their striking physical effects. This roadmap intends to
highlight the recent advances in the creation and control of increasingly
complex spatiotemporally sculptured pulses, from spatiotemporally separable to
complex nonseparable states, with diverse geometric and topological structures,
presenting a bird's eye viewpoint on the zoology of spatiotemporal light fields
and the outlook of future trends and open challenges.Comment: This is the version of the article before peer review or editing, as
submitted by an author to Journal of Optics. IOP Publishing Ltd is not
responsible for any errors or omissions in this version of the manuscript or
any version derived from i