Quasioptical modeling of wave beams with and without mode conversion: I. Basic theory

Understand

This work opens a series of papers where we develop a general quasioptical theory for mode-converting electromagnetic beams in plasma and implement it in a numerical algorithm.

• Here, the basic theory is introduced.
• We consider a general quasimonochromatic multi-component wave in a weakly inhomogeneous linear medium with no sources.
• For any given dispersion operator that governs the wave field, we explicitly calculate the approximate operator that governs the wave envelope $\psi$ to the second order in the geometrical-optics parameter.