The refraction and reflection laws from a complete integral of the eikonal equation and Huygens’ principle

In this work we assume that we have two given optical media with constant refraction indexes, which are separated by an arbitrary refracting surface. In one of the optical media we place a point light source at an arbitrary position. The aim of this work is to use a particular complete integral of the eikonal equation and Huygens' principle to obtain the refraction and reflection laws. We remark that this complete integral associates a new point light source with each light ray that arrives at the refracting surface. This means that by using only this complete integral it is not possible to determine the direction of propagation of the refracted light rays; the direction of propagation is obtained by imposing two extra conditions on the complete integral which are equivalent to Huygens' principle (in two dimensions, only one condition is needed). Finally, we establish the connection between the complete integral used here and that derived by using the k-function procedure introduced by Stavroudis, which works with plane wavefronts instead of spherical ones.