For the even acoustic waveguide mode , set and . At leading independent-edge order for large , the two incident travelling constituents each have amplitude at the relevant wall endpoint. Reflecting the upper-edge coordinates reverses the edge-wave sign. Their path phases are . Thus Sommerfeld half-plane diffraction gives the displayed sum, where . For , the apparent poles at are removable in the combined expression, with limit . Single-edge nonuniform far-field poles are not physical infinities. This combined far-field limit assumes a radiation distance beyond the aperture's near field and neglects further edge interactions; it is not uniform at duct cutoff.
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2008 iii Paper 88 2 a Solution Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Use polar coordinates with ; the two faces of the screen are . Take , so the incident wave approaches from the upper half-plane, and retain the specified time dependence . Outgoing cylindrical waves then have radial factor . Define the normalized Fresnel integralThe exact Neumann Sommerfeld half-plane diffraction solution for the total spatial field isOne way to verify the Helmholtz equation is to use parabolic coordinates , . Each term has the form . The operator is , and makes its Helmholtz residual zero. At , the two Fresnel arguments coincide, while the derivatives of both the arguments and plane-wave phases cancel in pairs. Hence , which is the required normal boundary condition.
Away from the Fresnel transition regions, integration by parts gives the Fresnel tail expansionwhere is the Heaviside step function. The same expansion follows from the complementary-error-function asymptotics in NIST DLMF. Because , the tails in both terms have outgoing phase . The scattered far field is consequentlyThe first term cancels the incident geometrical optics field in its shadow, the second is its reflected plane wave and the last is the diffracted edge wave. The expansion is nonuniform at and ; the exact Fresnel expression resolves those regions. Incidence from below follows by reflecting and .