Pulsed beam propagation in dispersive media

This paper is concerned with the behavior of transient wavefields due to a pulsed-beam (PB) wavepacket launched obliquely from a hypothetical aperture plane in a medium with generic dispersion k(w), where k and w are wavenumber and frequency, respectively. The problem is solved through spectral decomposition into plane waves in the frequency (w) and spatial wavenumber (/spl xi/) domains, followed by asymptotics on the spectral inversion integrals, with w-synthesis performed before /spl xi/-synthesis. Special attention in the transient spectral domain is given to paraxial PB approximations and to criteria for their range of validity. The resulting PBs can be used to synthesize transient wavefields excited by arbitrary space-time source distributions of finite support on a specified aperture plane in the medium.