Spatiotemporal coherency vortices controlled by source correlations structured in space and time

It is shown that tailoring the degree of coherence of a non-stationary source enables fine remote control of spatiotemporal topological state's dynamics of the generated optical field on its propagation in a diffractive-dispersive medium. In particular, we theoretically demonstrate that evolution, generation and annihilation of spatiotemporal coherency vortices (STCVs) is fully governed by source cosine-like correlation profiles, separable in space and time, solely via a pair of parameters. At a fixed propagation distance, four distinct STCVs with alternating topological charges of -1, +1, -1, and +1 are shown to be generated from a single source's STCV. In the spatially correlated limit, the spatial and temporal coordinates of the four vortices are shown to depend on the temporal correlation profile. However, in the temporally correlated limit, the spatial correlation profile can also control vortex annihilation and regeneration phenomena. In the general case of both non-trivial spatial and temporal source correlations present, an additional quartet of vortices is shown to emerge. Owing to unprecedented resilience of coherency vortices and STCVs, in particular, our results can find uses in optical technologies leveraging information encoding, transfer and acquisition via the topological states of radiation.