Gaussian beam decomposition of high frequency wave fields

In this paper, we present a method of decomposing a highly oscillatory wave field into a sparse superposition of Gaussian beams. The goal is to extract the necessary parameters for a Gaussian beam superposition from this wave field, so that further evolution of the high frequency waves can be computed by the method of Gaussian beams. The methodology is described for Rd with numerical examples for d=2. In the first example, a field generated by an interface reflection of Gaussian beams is decomposed into a superposition of Gaussian beams. The beam parameters are reconstructed to a very high accuracy. The data in the second example is not a superposition of a finite number of Gaussian beams. The wave field to be approximated is generated by a finite difference method for a geometry with two slits. The accuracy in the decomposition increases monotonically with the number of beams.