Wavefronts, light rays and caustic associated with the refraction of a plane wavefront by a conospherical lens

Abstract

Abstract The aim of the present work is to introduce a lens whose faces are a conical surface and a spherical surface. We illuminate this lens by a plane wavefront and its associated refracted wavefronts, light rays and caustic are computed. We find that the caustic region has two branches and can be virtual, real or one part virtual and the other real, depending on the values of the parameters characterizing the lens. Furthermore, we present a particular example where one of the branches of the caustic region is constituted by two segments of a line, one part is real and the other one virtual. The second branch is a two-dimensional surface with a singularity of the cusp ridge type such that its Gaussian curvature is different from zero. It is important to remark that for this example, the two branches of the caustic are disconnected. Because of this property and the result obtained by Berry and Balazs on the relationship between the acceleration of an Airy beam and the curvature of its corresponding caustic, we believe that using this optical element one could generate a scalar optical accelerating beam in the region where the caustic is a two-dimensional surface of revolution, and at the same time a scalar optical beam with similar properties to the Bessel beam of zero order in the region were the real caustic is a segment of a line along the optical axis.