Experimental study of laser beam propagation in turbulent atmosphere

Abstract

Intensity of atmospheric turbulence may overly affect bit error rate for a ground-based laser wireless communication system, so it is necessary to measure of atmospheric turbulence intensity and fluctuation of image centroid while laser beam propagates in turbulent atmosphere. In this paper, an experiment system is set up based on theory of light transmission in turbulent atmosphere. In the system, a laser named Nd : YAG is used horizontally to emit a laser beam with wavelength 1.06 μm on a platform at the height of 1.5 m. Three infrared CCD cameras are set at 200 m, 300 m(or 600 m) and 1000 m far from laser, which are applied to receive laser facula images from Lambertian boards, respectively. A lot of laser facula images are collected within some serial days under different periods of time every day, and hundreds of image frames are gathered at a time by making use of this experiment device. Fluctuation of image centroid is computed with these image frames, and the structure constant of atmospheric refractive index (C ²_n) is also derived. Finally, a comparison is made between aforementioned C²_n and those derived by meteorology factors.