On the representation of an inclined Gaussian beam

In most contemporary optics courses, Gaussian beams are demonstrated in the form of propagation along one coordinate axis. This is referred to as the conventional representation and is in fact a special form. In this paper, we derive the general representation of a Gaussian beam propagating obliquely to the coordinate axis, by performing a coordinate rotation transformation on the conventional representation. When doing so on the beam parameters, a restrictive condition has to be taken into account. Without this condition, the expressions for the beam parameters after the rotation are not consistent with the conventional ones.