Abstract

Atmospheric turbulence and target induced speckle can have a significant and deleterious effect on the performance of optical systems. The primary effect is to introduce a strong fluctuation in the intensity and a random perturbation of the phase of the fields at the optical receiver. This is equivalent to introducing a large noise source at the receiver; and consequently multiple samples and/or clever processing techniques are needed to accurately estimate the magnitude of the received intensity. In addition, for coherent detection schemes, the random phase and finite transverse coherence length introduced by the speckle and turbulence will limit the size of aperture that can be used. These characteristics of the speckle field after propagation through turbulence and its effect on optical systems will be discussed in a tutorial overview.

© 1985 Optical Society of America