Monochromatic electromagnetic wavelets and the huygens principle.

For the first time, to our knowledge, optical diffraction is shown to be a wavelet transform with the electromagnetic wavelets. We show that the optical wavelets proposed by Onural [Opt. Lett. 18, 846 (1993)] are the Huygens wavelets under a Fresnel approximation, and the electromagnetic wavelets proposed by Kaiser [A Friendly Guide to Wavelets (Birkhauser, Boston, Mass., 1994)] reduce to Hyugens wavelets in the case of a monochromatic field.