Effects of residual coherence on the scintillation of a partially coherent beam.

Abstract

Recent results show that partially coherent beams (PCB) can be conveniently generated in a multimode fiber and modulated with data at gigabit per second rates, which makes them attractive for free-space optical communication through turbulent atmosphere. An important feature of these realistic beams in contrast to model ones is the presence of residual coherence between pairs of points spatially separated by more than a few coherence radii on the beam aperture. In the present work we experimentally study the influence of this residual coherence on the scintillation of a partially coherent beam in a laboratory turbulence. It is shown that the total scintillation can be considered as a combination of scintillations of the coherent and incoherent parts of the full beam. When residual coherence is large the scintillation is mostly due to speckle motion on the detector. In the opposite case, the scintillation index settles at a low value pertaining to "ideal" homogeneous PCB.