MONOCHROMATIC ELECTROMAGNETIC WAVELETS AND THE HUYGENS PRINCIPLE

For the first time, to our knowledge, optical diffraction is shown to be a wavelet transform with the electromagnetic wavelets. Pde show tha t the optical wavelets proposed by Onural [Opt. Lett. 18, 846 (1993)] are the Huygens wavelets under a Fresnel approximation, and the electr omagnetic wavelets proposed by Kaiser [A Friendly Guide tp Wavelets (B irkhauser, Boston, Mass., 1994)] reduce to Hyugens wavelets in the cas e of a monochromatic field. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.