Abstract

The diffraction of plane waves from simple hard-edged apertures is a class of problem that is well understood in optics, at least within the scalar approximation [1]. Similarly, the diffraction of such waves from fractal apertures (amplitude or phase masks possessing many different spatial scalelengths) has also received much attention in the literature [2,3]. But the diffraction of fractal waves by simple apertures constitutes an entirely new paradigm (in optics particularly, and wave physics more generally) that remains largely unexplored. We have recently proposed fractal diffraction as a context of fundamental physical importance with wide potential application [4]. Moreover, we have investigated a bandwidth-limited Weierstrass function [5,6] as an instructive physical model for fractal illumination of the most elementary aperture imaginable: the infinite single slit [4].

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