Optical display of one-dimensional transient wave propagation in dispersive media

An optical set-up proposed recently by Lohmann et al. employed simple binary screens for generating amplitude variations proportional to the Airy function and Laguerre polynomials. In this paper, it is shown by analogy that the same optical scheme can be used to display the space-time evolution of the Green's function for one-dimensional wave propagation in a dispersive medium. Furthermore, by using two juxtaposed screens-a binary one containing information about the dispersive characteristics of the medium and another specifying the spatial spectrum of the initial pulse-one can have a display of the evolution of an arbitrary wavepacket.