Gaussian beam decomposition of high frequency wave fields

In this paper, we present a method of decomposing a highly oscillatory wave field into a sparse superposition of Gaussian beams. The goal is to extract the necessary parameters for a Gaussian beam superposition from this wave field, so that further evolution of the high frequency waves can be computed by the method of Gaussian beams. The methodology is described for R d with numerical examples for d = 2 . In the first example, a field generated by an interface reflection of Gaussian beams is decomposed into a superposition of Gaussian beams. The beam parameters are reconstructed to a very high accuracy. The data in the second example is not a superposition of a finite number of Gaussian beams. The wave field to be approximated is generated by a finite difference method for a geometry with two slits. The accuracy in the decomposition increases monotonically with the number of beams.