Scintillation of Arbitrary Optical Beams in a Weakly Random Medium.

Abstract

The study is concerned with deriving an expression for the scintillation of optical beams propagating through a weakly random medium for arbitrary transmitter wavefronts. The basis of the calculation is the extended Huygens-Fresnel principle of Lutomirski and Yura together with an expansion of the random component of the Green's function, the spherical distortion, to terms of second order in the refractive index fluctuation in a manner adapted from Schmeltzer. The scintillation formula is then applied to the simple analytic cases of plane wave, spherical wave, and collimated Gaussian beam wave scintillation by way of example, and the well-known results are obtained. (Author)

Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1973
Accession Number
AD0773799

Entities

People

  • Russell E. Warren

Organizations

  • Air Force Research Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Distortion
  • Optical Lattices
  • Plane Waves
  • Refractive Index
  • Scintillation
  • Spherical Waves
  • Transmitters
  • Wavefronts
  • Waves

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics.
  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Calculus or Mathematical Analysis