Pulsed beam propagation in lossless dispersive media

Concerns the parameterization of the effects of frequency dispersion on the propagation characteristics of a paraxially approximated pulsed beam (PB) wavepacket in a lossless medium with generic wavenumber profile. Various nondimensional measures-critical parameters-have been defined in order to systematically assess and quantify: a) the effect of dispersion on various observables associated with the PB field and thereby on the resolution of these observables; and b) the range of validity of the paraxial approximation under these conditions.