Kirchhoff’s theory for optical diffraction, its predecessor and subsequent development: the resilience of an inconsistent theory

Abstract

Kirchhoff’s 1882 theory of optical diffraction forms the centerpiece in the long-term development of wave optics, one that commenced in the 1820s when Fresnel produced an empirically successful theory based on a reinterpretation of Huygens’ principle, but without working from a wave equation. Then, in 1856, Stokes demonstrated that the principle was derivable from such an equation albeit without consideration of boundary conditions. Kirchhoff’s work a quarter century later marked a crucial, and widely influential, point for he produced Fresnel’s results by means of Green’s theorem and function under specific boundary conditions. In the late 1880s, Poincare uncovered an inconsistency between Kirchhoff’s conditions and his solution, one that seemed to imply that waves should not exist at all. Researchers nevertheless continued to use Kirchhoff’s theory—even though Rayleigh, and much later Sommerfeld, developed a different and mathematically consistent formulation that, however, did not match experimental data better than Kirchhoff’s theory. After all, Kirchhoff’s formula worked quite well in a specific approximation regime. Finally, in 1964, Marchand and Wolf employed the transformation of Kirchhoff’s surface integral that had been developed by Maggi and Rubinowicz for other purposes. The result yielded a consistent boundary condition that, while introducing a species of discontinuity, nevertheless rescued the essential structure of Kirchhoff’s original formulation from Poincare’s paradox.