Fictitious Diffracted Waves in the Diffraction Theory of Kirchhoff

Abstract

The diffraction theory of Kirchhoff is applied to the semi-infinite aperture of a black half-screen. The derivative of the spherical Green's function is taken into account without any approximation. The uniformly evaluated scattering integral is compared with the physical optics solution. It is shown that the non-omitted term causes the existence of fictitious diffracted waves. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America