Caustics for spherical waves

Caustics of weak shock waves

The caustics of weak shock waves are studied through matched asymptotic expansions. It is shown that these caustics are thinner and more intense than those of smooth waves with a comparable amplitude. This difference in scalings solves a paradox that would have the caustics of weak shock waves behave linearly, even though linear theory for discontinuous fronts predicts infinite amplitudes near ...

Caustics of Compensated Spherical Lens Models

We consider compensated spherical lens models and the caustic surfaces they create in the past light cone. Examination of cusp and crossover angles associated with particular source and lens redshifts gives explicit lensing models that con rm the claims of Paper I [1], namely that area distances can di er by substantial factors from angular diameter distances even when averaged over large angul...

Impulsive spherical gravitational waves

Penrose’s identification with warp provides the general framework for constructing the continuous form of impulsive gravitational wave metrics. We present the 2-component spinor formalism for the derivation of the full family of impulsive spherical gravitational wave metrics which brings out the power in identification with warp and leads to the simplest derivation of exact solutions. These sol...

Generation of Caustics and Spatial Rogue Waves from Nonlinear Instability

Stylized Caustics: Progressive Rendering of Animated Caustics

In recent years, much work was devoted to the design of light editing methods such as relighting and light path editing. So far, little work addressed the target-based manipulation and animation of caustics, for instance to a differently-shaped caustic, text or an image. The aim of this work is the animation of caustics by blending towards a given target irradiance distribution. This enables an...