To unify travelling- and standing-wave ray-wave structured light by coherent wave packets

Structured light with diverse degrees of freedom (DoFs) has recently attracted wide attention. Especially, the ray-wave beams that could be described by both rays and wave packet, can open multiple DoFs by the ray- wave duality. Here a generalized ray-wave beam family is proposed to unify the spatial mode evolution of the azimuthally traveling-wave (TW) and standing-wave (SW) structured light, by introducing a reconfigureable ray-split/fusion structure. We derive an elegant closed-form expression by utilizing frequency-degenerate Ince- Gaussian eigenmodes to construct a new ray-wave beams family to precisely parameterize the ray-split/fusion process, pushing structured light control in higher dimensions. We also experimentally generate these modes by dynamic control of a digital hologram system, revealing their potential applications in optical manipulation and communication.