Rubinowicz and the Modern Theory of Diffracted Rays

ABSTRACT In 1924 the Polish scientist Rubinowicz published a paper where he investigated the field penetrating through an aperture in an opaque screen using the Kirchhoff approximation. In that paper he established the ray properties of the diffraction field and predicted some basic elements of the modern asymptotic theories such as the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction, the Physical Theory of Diffraction, and Uniform Theories of Diffraction. In particular, he demonstrated that every stationary point on an aperture edge created an entire cone of diffracted rays which satisfy Fermat's priniciple. In the present paper it is shown how the modern theory of edge diffracted rays can be constructed as a natural generalization of the Rubinowicz results. This generalization is carried out first for the scalar diffraction problem and further for the vector problem.