Effect of steady-state thermal blooming on partially coherent radially polarized beams propagating in the atmosphere

Abstract

We undertake a computational study of the steady-state thermal blooming effect on a special class of partially coherent vector beams, called partially coherent radially polarized (PCRP) beams, propagating through the atmosphere. A computational propagation model that is based on a multi-phase screen method is established to simulate partially coherent vector beams. With the use of this model, the propagation properties of PCRP beams with different initial powers and spatial coherence widths are studied in detail, including average intensity distribution, r.m.s. beam width, and polarization. Our results unveil that PCRP beams can effectively reduce or overcome the negative effects caused by thermal blooming when the initial coherence width falls below a certain threshold. Further, it is shown that the spatial distribution of degree of polarization (DOP) is significantly affected by the thermal blooming during beam propagation, whereas the global DOP (integrating the DOP over a beam’s cross-section) is not.