RUBINOWICZ AND THE MODERN THEORY OF DIFFRACTED RAYS

In 1924 the Polish scientist Rubinowicz published a paper where he inv estigated the field penetrating through an aperture in an opaque scree n using the Kirchhoff approximation. In that paper he established the ray properties of the diffraction field and predicted some basic eleme nts of the modern asymptotic theories such as the Geometrical Theory o f Diffraction, the Physical Theory of Diffraction, and Uniform Theorie s of Diffraction. In particular, he demonstrated that every stationary point on an aperture edge created an entire cone of diffracted rays w hich satisfy Fermat's priniciple. In the present paper it is shown how the modern theory of edge diffracted rays can be constructed as a nat ural generalization of the Rubinowicz results. This generalization is carried out first for the scalar diffraction problem and further for t he vector problem.