Related papers: Caustics of wave fronts reflected by a surface
In front of a mirror, the radiation of weakly driven large disordered clouds presents an interference fringe in the backward direction, on top of an incoherent background. Although strongly driven atoms usually present little coherent…
We prove that the focal set generated by the reflection of a point source off a translation invariant surface consists of two sets: a curve and a surface. The focal curve lies in the plane orthogonal to the symmetry direction containing the…
An exact formulation of the propagation of a monochromatic wave packet impinging upon a transparent, homogeneous, isotropic and parallel slab at oblique incidence is presented. Approximate formulas are derived for low divergence Gaussian…
The reflection and transmission amplitudes of waves in disordered multimode waveguides are studied by means of numerical simulations based on the invariant embedding equations. In particular, we analyze the influence of surface-type…
A gravitational wave stochastic background of astrophysical origin may have resulted from the superposition of a large number of unresolved sources since the beginning of stellar activity. Its detection would put very strong constrains on…
Two methods are explained to exactly solve Maxwell's equations where permittivity, permeability and conductivity may vary in space. In the constitutive relations, retardation is regarded. If the material properties depend but on one…
All optical systems, which involve the collimation of a reflected, transmitted or scattered wave subsequent to tight focusing, are subject to two kinds of deviations. One is the wavefront curvature due to inaccurate focal placement of the…
The behavior of an elastic curve bound to a surface will reflect the geometry of its environment. This may occur in an obvious way: the curve may deform freely along directions tangent to the surface, but not along the surface normal.…
A point source of light is placed inside an oval. The $n$-th caustic by reflection is the envelope of the light rays emanating from the light source after $n$ reflections off the curve. We show that each of these caustics, for a generic…
The basic laws of geometrical optics can be deduced from energy-momentum conservation for electromagnetic waves, without other wave concepts. However, the concept of quanta is required; it arises naturally, hence such a hypothesis could…
The interaction of a wave packet (and in particular the wave front) with a mass barrier is investigated in one dimension. We discuss the main features of the wave packet that are inherent to two-dimensional wave packets, such as compression…
First geometric calculus alongside its description of equiangular spirals, reflections and rotations is introduced briefly. Then single and double reflections at such a spiral are investigated. It proves suitable to distinguish incidence…
We use geometrical optics and the caustic-touching theorem to study, in an exact way, the change in the topology of the image of an object obtained by reflections on an arbitrary smooth surface. Since the procedure that we use to compute…
The wave description of geometric phase uses the superposition of light waves to explain the geometric phase's origin. While our previous work focused on a basis of linearly polarized waves, here we show that the same concepts can be…
A Platonic surface is a Riemann surface that underlies a regular map and so we can consider its vertices, edge-centres and face-centres. A symmetry (anticonformal involution) of the surface will fix a number of simple closed curves which we…
We investigate geometric invariants of cuspidal edges on focal surfaces of regular surface. In particular, we shall clarify the sign of the singular curvature at a cuspidal edge on a focal surface using singularities of parallel surface of…
Scattering of optical waves by a multi-scale rough mirror surface as a phase screen is considered. To solve the problem we used the diffusion phase approximation and numerical model of a phase jump. The scattering intensity was averaged…
The roughness of glass surfaces after different stages of etching is investigated by reflection measurements with a spectrophotometer, light scattering, and atomic-force microscopy (in small scale), and Talysurf (in large scale). The…
The geometry of a light wavefront, evolving from a initial flat wavefront in the 3-space associated with a post-Newtonian relativistic spacetime, is studied numerically by means of the ray tracing method. For a discretization of the…
We investigate the caustic structure of a lens composed by a discrete number of point-masses, having mutual distances smaller than the Einstein radius of the total mass of the system. Along with the main critical curve, it is known that the…