Wavefronts, light rays and caustic associated with the refraction of a plane wave by a conospherical lens

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to introduce a lens whose faces are a conical surface and a spherical surface. We illuminate this lens by a plane wavefront and its associated refracted wavefronts, light rays and caustic are computed. We find that the caustic has two branches. The first is constituted by two segments of a line, one part of this caustic is real and the other one virtual. The second branch of the caustic is a two-dimensional surface with a singularity of the cusp ridge type. It is important to remark that the two branches of the caustic are disconnected. Because of this property we believe that using this optical element one could generate a scalar optical accelerating beam in the region where the caustic is a two-dimensional surface of revolution, and at the same time a scalar optical beam with similar properties to the Bessel beam of zero order in the region were the real caustic is a segment of a line along the optical axis.