Intensity Fluctuations of Incoherently Superposed Gaussian Beams in Atmospheric Turbulence

Abstract

Intensity fluctuations of incoherently superposed Gaussian beams are formulated in weak turbulence by employing the extended Huygens-Fresnel principle. Each individual beam superposed is taken to be fully incoherent. The scintillation index evaluated for different number of beams indicates that as the number of beams increase, scintillations decrease. Incoherent superposition of smaller sized Gaussian sources exhibits smaller fluctuations. Comparing the scintillation index arising from incoherently superposed Gaussian beams to the scintillation index of coherently superposed Gaussian beams of the same structure shows that incoherent superposition yields lower intensity fluctuations, thus can be advantageous in atmospheric optical communication links.