Impact of turbulence on high-precision ground-satellite frequency transfer with two-way coherent optical links

Abstract

Bidirectional ground-satellite laser links suffer from turbulence-induced scintillation and phase distortion. We study the impact of turbulence on coherent detection and the related phase noise that restricts time and frequency transfer precision. We evaluate the capacity to obtain a two-way cancellation of atmospheric effects despite the asymmetry between up- and downlink that limits the link reciprocity. For ground-satellite links, the asymmetry is induced by point-ahead angle and possibly the use, for the ground terminal, of different transceiver diameters, in reception and emission. The quantitative analysis is obtained thanks to refined end-to-end simulations under realistic turbulence and wind conditions as well as satellite kinematics. These temporally resolved simulations allow characterizing the coherent detection in terms of time series of heterodyne efficiency and phase noise for different system parameters. We show that tip-tilt correction on ground is mandatory at reception for the downlink and as a pre-compensation of the uplink. Besides, thanks to the large tilt angular correlation, the correction is shown to be efficient on uplink despite the point-ahead angle. Very good two-way compensation of turbulent effects is obtained even with the asymmetries. The two-way differential phase noise is reduced to $1{\mathrm{rad}}^{2}$, with the best fractional frequency stability below $2\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{10}^{\ensuremath{-}17}$ after 1-s averaging time.