Reflection of a wave off a surface

Abstract

Recent advances in twistor theory are applied to geometric optics in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$. The general formulae for reflection of a wavefront in a surface are derived and in three special cases explicit descriptions are provided: when the reflecting surface is a plane, when the incoming wave is a plane and when the incoming wave is spherical. In each case particular examples are computed exactly and the results plotted to illustrate the outgoing wavefront.

14 pages, AMS-LATEX

References in corpus (2)

• On the Space of Oriented Affine Lines in $R^3$
• Generalised Surfaces in ${\mathbb{R}}^3$

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Reflection in a Translation Invariant Surface
• On Hamilton's Characteristic Functions for Reflection
• The Geometry of Focal Sets