Hernández-Figueroa H.E., Zamboni-Rached M., Recami E. (Eds.) Localized Waves

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New Jersey, Canada, 2008. — 395 p. — ISBN: 9780470108857.Diffraction and dispersion effects have been well known for centuries and are recognized to be limiting factors in many industrial and technology applications based, for example, on electromagnetic beams and pulses. Diffraction is an always-present phenomenon, affecting two- or three-dimensional waves traveling in nonguiding media. Arbitrary pulses and beams contain plane-wave components that propagate in different directions, causing a progressive increase in their spatial width along propagation. Dispersion is due to the dependence of the material media (refractive index) with frequency: therefore, each pulse’s spectral component propagates with a different phase velocity, so that an electromagnetic pulse will suffer a progressive increase in its temporal width along propagation. It is clear that these two effects may be a serious restriction for applications where it is highly desirable that the beam keeps its transverse localization or the pulse keeps its transverse localization and/or temporal width along propagation, which might be desirable, for example, in free-space microwave, millimetric wave, terahertz and optical communications, microwave and optical images, optical lithography, and optical tweezers. As a consequence, the development of techniques capable of alleviating signal degradation effects caused by these two effects is of crucial importance.
The 12 chapters of this book are authored by the most productive researchers in the field and will offer a well balanced presentation between theory and experiments in localized waves.Localized Waves: A Historical and Scientific Introduction
Structure of Nondiffracting Waves and Some Interesting Applications
Two Hybrid Spectral Representations and Their Applications to the Derivations of Finite-Energy Localized Waves and Pulsed Beams
Ultrasonic Imaging with Limited-Diffraction Beams
Propagation-Invariant Fields: Rotationally Periodic and Anisotropic Nondiffracting Waves
Bessel X-Wave Propagation
Linear-Optical Generation of Localized Waves
Optical Wave Modes: Localized and Propagation-Invariant Wave Packets in Optically Transparent Dispersive Media
Nonlinear X-Waves
Diffraction-Free Subwavelength-Beam Optics on a Nanometer Scale
Self-Reconstruction of Pulsed Optical X-Waves
Localization and Wannier Wave Packets in Photonic Crystals Without Defects
Spatially Localized Vortex Structures