Intrinsic cylindrical and spherical waves

Intrinsic waveforms associated with cylindrical and spherical Bessel functions are obtained by eliminating the factors responsible for the inverse radius and inverse square radius laws of wave power per unit area of wavefront. The resulting expressions are Riccati-Bessel functions for both cases and these can be written in terms of amplitude and phase functions of order v and wave variable z.. When z is real, it is shown that a spatial phase angle of the intrinsic wave can be defined and this, together with its amplitude function, is systematically investigated for a range of fixed orders and varying z. The derivatives of Riccati-Bessel functions are also examined. All the component functions exhibit different behaviour in the near field depending on the order being less than, equal to or greater than 1/2. Plots of the phase angle can be used to display the locations of the zeros of the general Riccati-Bessel functions and lead to new relations concerning the ordering of the real zeros of Bessel functions and the occurrence of multiple zeros when the argument of the Bessel function is fixed.