Mitigation of atmospheric turbulence effect by light beams carrying self-rotating wavefront

Abstract

We propose an approach against the turbulence-induced degradation by using laser beam with self-rotating wavefront. Such laser beam, generated by the coherent combination of vortex beams with different helical charges and central angular frequencies, can introduce coupling of its wavefront in spatial and temporal domain, that is, periodic wavefront rotation. When the wavefront rotation is faster than the airflow, the laser beam can travel through the inhomogeneity and anisotropy of air in the azimuthal direction within the time interval of airflow. The wavefront distortion caused by the turbulent atmosphere is therefore rotated and gradually smoothed as the laser beam travels. After the laser propagating through the turbulent atmosphere, the total wavefront distortion becomes centrosymmetric with lower peak-to-valley (PV) value. Such smoothed wavefront distortion can dramatically eliminate the turbulence-induced degradation of laser beams, especially beam centroid drift. We believe that this approach can lead to new trend in remote sensing, free-space optical communication, lidar, etc.