Bessel and conical beams and approximation with annular arrays.

The Bessel beam is one of the relatively new limited-diffraction beams that have been discovered. It is compared with the conical transducer, which also gives an approximate limited-diffraction solution to the wave equation. The conical transducer's field deviates from the predicted field in the nearfield, where it is wider. Therefore, the Bessel beam is better for use in a hybrid system where a limited-diffraction beam is used for transmission and a dynamically focused beam for reception. The limited-diffraction Bessel beam of order zero can be excited on an annular transducer with equal-area division of elements and with a fixed prefocus, i.e., conventional transducers used in commercial medical imaging equipment. The element division implies that the scaling parameter must be chosen to contain the first lobe of the Bessel function in the first element. In addition, the prefocus must be such that the array is steerable to infinite depth with minor loss. Even when the Bessel beam yields a larger depth of field than that of an unfocused transducer, it has the advantage of a narrower beam. Simulated examples are shown where the approximate Bessel beam compares favorably with a spherically focused beam with a fixed focus, an unfocused beam, and a conical transducer.