Caustics are captivating light patterns created by materials bundling or diverting light by refraction or reflection. We know caustics as random side effects, appearing, for example, at the bottom of a swimming pool. In this paper we show that it is possible to control caustic patterns to form almost any desired shape by optimizing the geometry of the reflective or refractive surface generating...

We study the effect of the core radius of an isothermal ellipsoidal gravitational lens on the caustics and the critical curves. We derive an analytic expression of the caustics for an isothermal ellipsoidal gravitational lens via a sixth-order algebraic equation. Since the expression is too long, by using another method we obtain a parametric representation of the critical curves in order to sh...

in this paper, the experimental method of caustics and its application to stress field and related studies in fracture mechanics is described. theocaris [1,2,3] has used the optical method of caustics to study stress intensity factors and the stress field around crack tips, in cracked transparent plates. many other researchers have also used this method to obtain stress intensity factors for di...

As early as 1927, legislation in the United States governing the packaging of lyeand acidcontaining products mandated that warning labels be placed on these products. In response to the recognition that caustic exposures were more frequent in children, the Federal Hazardous Substances Act and Poison Prevention Packaging Act were passed in 1970; these acts mandated that all caustics with a conce...

The late infall of cold dark matter onto an isolated galaxy, such as our own, produces streams and caustics in its halo. The outer caustics are topological spheres whereas the inner caustics are rings. The self-similar model of galactic halo formation predicts that the caustic ring radii an follow the approximate law an ∼ 1/n. In a study of 32 extended and well-measured external galactic rotati...

On fine scales, caustics produced with white light show vividly colored diffraction fringes. For caustics described by the elementary catastrophes of singularity theory, the colors are characteristic of the type of singularity. We study the diffraction colors of the fold and cusp catastrophes. The colors can be simulated computationally as the superposition of monochromatic patterns for differe...

We consider scalar Born-Infeld type theories with arbitrary potentials V (T ) of a scalar field T . We find that for models with runaway potentials V (T ) the generic inhomogeneous solutions after a short transient stage can be very well approximated by the solutions of a Hamilton-Jacobi equation that describes free streaming wave front propagation. The analytic solution for this wave propagati...

Caustics are high-density structures that form frequently in collisionless media. Under self-gravity, cold dark matter flows focus onto caustics which are yet to be resolved in numerical simulations and or observed in the real world. If detected, caustics would provide a strong evidence for dark matter and would rule out alternative models such as those with modified dynamics. Here, we demonstr...

We find a simple expression for critical curves of a binary gravitational lens. On the basis of this, we present a parametric representation of such curves. The caustics can also be expressed with the same parameterization. The present result is helpful for efficiently constructing many templates of light curves due to binary systems, particularly extrasolar planets, which cause spikes in the l...