Angle of arrival fluctuations for free space laser beam propagation through non kolmogorov turbulence

Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence induces significant variation on the angle-of-arrival of laser beams used in free space laser communication. Angle-of-arrival fluctuations of an optical wave in the plane of the receiver aperture can be described in terms of the phase structure function that already has been calculated by Kolmogorov's power spectral density model. Unfortunately several experiments showed that Kolmogorov theory is sometimes incomplete to describe atmospheric statistics properly. In this paper, for horizontal path and weak turbulence, we carry out analysis of angle-of-arrival fluctuations using a non Kolmogorov power spectrum which uses a generalized exponent factor instead of constant standard exponent value 11/3 and a generalized amplitude factor instead of constant value 0.033. Also our non Kolmogorov spectrum includes both inner scale and outer scale effects.