On the numerical evaluation of cuspoid diffraction catastrophes.
A simple computational approach is proposed for the evaluation of cuspoid diffraction catastrophes, which are fundamental tools for the description of wave fields in proximity to stable caustics. In particular, on representing the Pearcey and the swallowtail functions in terms of convergent series expansions, the action of the Weniger transformation on them is numerically studied for both real and complex values of the cuspoid arguments. Numerical experiments, aimed at giving evidence of the effectiveness and implementative ease of the proposed method, together with some quantitative comparisons to previously published results, are also presented.
Borghi
Riccardo
R
Dipartimento di Elettronica Applicata and CNISM, Università degli Studi Roma Tre, Rome, Italy. borghi@uniroma3.it