Statistical properties of a laser beam propagating in a turbulent medium

Abstract

We examine statistical properties of a laser beam propagating in a turbulent medium. We prove that the intensity fluctuations at large propagation distances possess Gaussian probability density function and establish quantitative criteria for realizing the Gaussian statistics depending on the laser propagation distance, the laser beam waist, the laser frequency and the turbulence strength. We calculate explicitly the laser envelope pair correlation function and corrections to its higher order correlation functions breaking Gaussianity. We discuss also statistical properties of the brightest spots in the speckle pattern.

A new set of efficient SMP-parallel 2D Fourier subroutines

“…For example, turbulence simulations require wide range of scales, in other words large wavenumbers arrays, like in the recent work [12]. In order to check some theoretical predictions for propagation of the laser radiation in a turbulent atmosphere, like in paper [13], one needs 2D array of at least (!) (43000) 2 size.…”