Scintillations of optical vortex in randomly inhomogeneous medium

TL;DR

This paper compares how optical vortex beams and other laser beams scintillate when propagating through turbulent atmosphere, revealing distinct behaviors and a step-like dependence of scintillation on turbulence intensity.

Contribution

It provides the first comparative numerical and analytical analysis of scintillation indices for vortex and non-vortex beams in turbulent media.

Findings

Scintillation index at the vortex axis exhibits a step-like dependence on turbulence.

Vortex and non-vortex beams show significantly different scintillation behaviors.

Analytical and numerical results align in characterizing beam scintillations.

Abstract

The comparative numerical and analytical analysis of scintillation indices of the vortex Laguerre-Gaussian beam and the non-vortex doughnut hole and Gaussian beams propagating in the randomly inhomogeneous atmosphere has been performed. It has been found that the dependence of the scintillation index at the axis of the optical vortex on the turbulence intensity at the path has the form of a unit step. It has been shown that the behavior of scintillations in the cross sections of vortex and non-vortex beams differs widely.