Annular, cosh and cos Gaussian beams in strong turbulence

Abstract

For the strong atmospheric turbulence regime, the asymptotic on-axis scintillation behavior of annular, cosh and cos Gaussian beams is theoretically derived and illustrated with numerical examples. It is observed from the plots that annular Gaussian beams exhibit more scintillations than a Gaussian beam, regardless of the amplitude coefficient and source size settings. For small source sizes, cosh Gaussian beams seem to have an advantage over Gaussian beams in terms of reduced scintillation, but for large source sizes a switchover occurs where cos Gaussian beams assume the advantage. Analysis of the effect of inner scale value shows that scintillations increases for all beams as the inner scale increases.