Turbulence-induced persistence in laser beam wandering

Abstract

We have experimentally confirmed the presence of long-memory correlations in the wandering of a thin Gaussian laser beam over a screen after propagating through a turbulent medium. A laboratory-controlled experiment was conducted in which coordinate fluctuations of the laser beam were recorded at a sufficiently high sampling rate for a wide range of turbulent conditions. Horizontal and vertical displacements of the laser beam centroid were subsequently analyzed by implementing detrended fluctuation analysis. This is a very well-known and widely used methodology to unveil memory effects from time series. Results obtained from this experimental analysis allow us to confirm that both coordinates behave as highly persistent signals for strong turbulent intensities. This finding is relevant for a better comprehension and modeling of the turbulence effects in free-space optical communication systems and other applications related to propagation of optical signals in the atmosphere.

4 pages, 4 figures, 27 references. Minor grammatical changes to match the published version. Comments and suggestions are welcomed

References in corpus (7)

• Detecting Long-range Correlations with Detrended Fluctuation Analysis
• On the scaling ranges of detrended fluctuation analysis for long-memory correlated short series of data
• Modeling turbulent wave-front phase as a fractional Brownian motion: a new approach
• Resilience of hybrid optical angular momentum qubits to turbulence
• Cancellation of atmospheric turbulence effects in entangled two-photon beams
• Experimental confirmation of long-memory correlations in star-wander data
• A fractional Brownian motion model for the turbulent refractive index in lightwave propagation

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Multiscale permutation entropy analysis of laser beam wandering in isotropic turbulence