Multimode Laser Beam Scintillations in Non-Kolmogorov Turbulence

Abstract

Employing the Rytov solution, the scintillation index at the origin of the receiver plane is evaluated in non-Kolmogorov weak atmospheric turbulence when multimode laser incidence is used. The solution presented can be used when the multimode is composed of even modes. The novelty of this work lies in the theoretical combination of multimode laser beam excitation and non-Kolmogorov turbulence in the scintillation evaluations, which is not known both theoretically and experimentally. The study involves mathematical rigor but no experimental results. Being valid for any power law exponent of the non-Kolmogorov turbulence, the scintillations of the multimode beams are found to be smaller than the scintillation index of a single Gaussian beam. For the multimode laser beam excitation, the scintillation index is smaller at smaller power law exponent values. If the multimode content is formed by beams with larger mode numbers, the scintillations decrease for any non-Kolmogorov realization. When large sized beams are used in the multimode, the scintillations increase as compared to small sized content, and the scintillations become almost the same as the Gaussian beam scintillations. Comparing the multimode structures that have the same number of beams, the ones with higher order modes yield smaller scintillations, and for such multimode structures, very similar scintillation index behaviour versus the power law exponent can be obtained by varying the amplitudes of the modes composing the multimode. The main contribution of this paper is the formulation and evaluation of the scintillation noise in order to understand whether the use of multimode laser excitation will improve the link performance of optical wireless communication systems operating in a non-Kolmogorov atmosphere.