Diffraction of plane waves, spherical waves, and beyond

Abstract

We review the diffraction theory for plane waves and establish its connection to the diffraction of Besicovitch almost periodic functions, extending the theory to an unbounded setting and providing explicit formulas. Then, we give an alternative proof that the diffraction of a spherical wave in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is a single sphere, which was recently shown in \cite{BKM25}. After developing a suitable framework for working with spherically symmetric measures, including a radial analogue of the usual Lebesgue decomposition, we introduce the notion of radial almost periodicity. In particular, we define a space of Besicovitch radially almost periodic functions and show that this space contains precisely the functions whose radial part is Besicovitch almost periodic. The paper concludes with a diffraction analysis of these functions.