Computation of optimal beams in weak turbulence

Abstract

When an optical beam propagates through a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere or ocean, the beam will become distorted. It is then natural to seek the best or optimal beam that is distorted least, under some metric such as intensity or scintillation. We seek to maximize the light intensity at the receiver using the paraxial wave equation with weak-fluctuation as the model. In contrast to classical results that typically confine original laser beams to be from a special class, we allow the beam to be general, which leads to an eigenvalue problem of a large-sized matrix with each entry being a multi-dimensional integral. This is an expensive and sometimes infeasible computational task in many practically reasonable settings. To overcome this expense, in a change from past calculations of optimal beams, we transform the calculation from physical space to Fourier space. Since the structure of the turbulence is commonly described in Fourier space, the computational cost is significantly reduced. This also allows us to incorporate some optional turbulence assumptions, such as homogeneous-statistics assumption, small-length-scale cutoff assumption, and Markov assumption, to further reduce the dimension of the numerical integral. The proposed methods provide a computational strategy that is numerically feasible, and results are demonstrated in several numerical examples. These results provide further evidence that special beams can be defined to have beam divergence that is small.