Optical orbital angular momentum under strong scintillation

TL;DR

This paper compares two theoretical models for the evolution of optical orbital angular momentum in atmospheric turbulence, showing that the multi-phase screen method aligns well with simulations especially under strong scintillation conditions.

Contribution

It evaluates the accuracy of SPS and IPE models against numerical simulations, highlighting the limitations of SPS in strong scintillation regimes.

Findings

IPE matches simulations across all turbulence conditions

SPS deviates under strong scintillation

Both models agree in weak scintillation regime

Abstract

The evolution of classical optical fields propagating through atmospheric turbulence is investigated under arbitrary conditions. We use the single-phase screen (SPS) method and the infinitesimal propagation equation (IPE), a multi-phase screen (MPS) method, to compute the optical power fractions retained in an input Laguerre-Gauss (LG) mode or transferred to higher order LG modes. Although they show the same trend while the scintillation is weak, the IPE and SPS predictions deviate when the strength of scintillation passes a certain threshold. These predictions are compared with numerical simulations of optical fields propagating through turbulence. The simulations are performed using an MPS model, based on the Kolmogorov theory of turbulence, for different turbulence conditions to allow comparison in both weak and strong scintillation. The numerical results agree well with the IPE results in all conditions, but deviate from the SPS results for strong scintillation.