Effects of aberration on paraxial wave beams: beam tracing versus quasi-optical solutions

This paper aims to clarify the role of aberration effects on the propagation and absorption of wave beams in inhomogeneous dispersive and dissipative media. We consider models in which aberration effects can be caused by the presence of either caustics or spatially dispersive absorption, with reference to the propagation near a cut-off or to the electron cyclotron (EC) resonance, respectively. For such models, the standard beam tracing description of paraxial wave beams and the recently proposed quasi-optical method, which accounts for aberration, are compared and verified on the basis of the analytical exact solutions. We find that the presence of a cut-off implies no significant aberration of the beam, while significant aberration is found when dispersive absorption is so strong that different wavenumbers in the beam spectrum are damped at different locations. This phenomenon is well described by the quasi-optical method. At last, an extrapolation of this simple two-dimensional model to the case of the ITER upper EC port is addressed with the result that the broadening of the power deposition profiles never exceeds 10%.