This year marks the tenth anniversary of Advances in Optics and Photonics (AOP), the OSA journal that publishes comprehensive review articles and multimedia tutorials. I had the honor of publishing a review article “Cylindrical vector beams: from mathematical concepts to applications” as the very first paper in the inaugural issue of AOP [1]. Since its publication, this paper has been a constant on the list of top downloads and has been one of the top-cited papers published in AOP within the past ten years. Articles citing my review have appeared in a wide range of optics and photonics journals such as Nature Photonics, Optica, and Laser and Photonics Reviews, as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Nanotechnology, Nano Letters, and Advanced Materials. This is a clear testimony to the strong influence and broad impact of AOP, as it was designed to achieve when the journal was launched.

Publishing a review article in AOP has certainly helped to attract increased attention to the field. Various new methods for generating cylindrical vector beams (CVB) have been developed. Particularly worthy of mention is the development of fiber laser sources. Through the continuous efforts of several international groups, all-fiber lasers producing CVB outputs operating under CW, Q-switching, mode-locking, and even random lasing mode have been reported. Commercial high-power CVB ${\mathrm{CO}}_2$ lasers and fiber lasers are now available on the market. VCSEL lasers that produce cylindrical vector beams have been realized for device miniaturization. On the passive generation side, in addition to the widely used liquid crystal spatial light modulator based techniques, metasurfaces have attracted a lot of attention recently due to their flat and compact nature as well as the inherent strong interaction with optical polarization. Several commercial devices that are based on either liquid crystals or directly laser-written nanostructures are now available on the market as well.

Community interest has evolved to vectorial optical fields that are not limited to having cylindrical symmetry. Full Poincaré sphere beams (FPB) have been proposed and studied. FPBs represent one class of beams whose cross section contains the state of polarization covering the entire Poincaré sphere. High-order FPBs have been applied to flattop beam shaping. More complex optical fields with arbitrarily designed amplitude, phase, and polarization (orientation and ellipticity) are now available in the laboratory, and their applications in optical focal field engineering, spin density tailoring, and optical micromanipulation have been explored. Such complex optical fields combine rich phase and polarization singularities within their cross section, leading to an intimate connection with photonic orbital angular momentum, which is also a rapidly developing hot topic reviewed in another excellent AOP article by Yao and Padgett [2]. Upon propagation, focusing, and interaction with matter and structures, such complex optical fields exhibit unique spin-orbital interaction phenomena. The tremendous degree of freedom available within the complex optical fields provides a comprehensive tool box for the study of spin angular momentum, orbital angular momentum, and their interactions with materials and structures via spin-orbital coupling.

On the application side, these spatially complex optical fields continue to attract attention in high numerical aperture focusing and their associated applications in microscopy, metrology, micromanipulation, laser acceleration, and laser machining. Meanwhile, the scope of applications has been continuously expanding. The higher degree of freedom contained within the cross section of these complex optical fields found applications in enhanced transmission through turbulence and other complex media, biomedical imaging, high precision interferometry, weak electromagnetic field detection, higher dimensional quantum entanglement, quantum key distribution, free space optical telecommunications, and so on.

The rapid growth of the field is also reflected in the increasing number of conferences, special symposia, and workshops organized by OSA, SPIE, and IEEE. Several special issues dedicated to this topic have been organized in Optics Express, Journal of Optics, Chinese Optics Letters, and so on. In 2013, I edited a monograph with the title Vectorial Optical Fields: Fundamentals and Applications [3]. However, I quickly realized that it was almost impossible to paint a comprehensive picture of the field in such a monograph, owing to the rapid development of the field. The research field has certainly come a long way since the publication of the AOP review ten years ago, but I believe more exciting developments are already on the horizon. Adding temporal control to the spatially complex optical as the fifth degree of freedom is on the verge of breakthrough. The rapid advances made in nanostructured materials offer strong synergy with the high-dimensional degree of freedom provided by the spatiotemporally complex fields. Such spatiotemporally tailored optical fields also call for devices with faster responses. Practical applications of these complex fields in intelligent manufacturing and high capacity data communication as well as transmission through complex media are becoming increasingly feasible.

In retrospect, the AOP review article has played a very important role in my career development. It surely has increased the visibility of my research to a broader audience and has helped me to gain recognition in the community. Many times at conferences graduate students and young scientists have approached me and said “I read your AOP review article on Cylindrical Vector Beams and it helped my research a lot.” To me, these are the most rewarding moments as a scholar. For all of that, I owe my deep gratitude to the entire AOP publishing team, and especially to Prof. Bahaa Saleh. As the founding Editor-in-Chief of AOP, he set a very high standard for the journal since the beginning. He was highly engaged in the publishing process and very meticulous about every detail of the manuscript, including the context and presentation style. Without his patience and guidance, this review article may have never come to fruition. Now, under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Prof. Govind Agrawal, I trust AOP will continue to grow and become the go-to place for review and tutorial articles with long-lasting influence and impact in the optics and photonics community.