Anisotropic plasma sheath turbulence effects on the mode states of Whittaker–Gaussian beams

Abstract

In this paper detection probability and crosstalk probability variance of the orbital angular momentum states of the diffraction-free Whittaker–Gaussian (WG) beams passing through an anisotropic plasma sheath turbulence (PST) are theoretically formulated. In this regard, using modified von Karman spectrum in the frame of Rytov theory the spiral spectrum of the WG beams is derived, and the role of the anisotropy parameters, refractive index fluctuation variance, initial topological charge, receiving aperture radius, the outer scale of turbulence, beam wavelength and waist in the mitigation of the turbulence-induced disturbance is numerically explored. The remarkable findings indicate that WG beams in anisotropic PST are less influenced than isotropic one, and increasing the anisotropy feature of plasma medium leads to alleviate modulated distortion. Furthermore, it is found out that the propagation performance of WG vortex beams with high-order initial topological charge is significantly better than those with lower order. We expect that our results will be helpful for designing optimal free-space communication systems.