Experimental study of turbulence-induced beam wander and deformation of a partially coherent beam

摘要

We carry out an experimental study of the effect of spatial coherence on the beam wander and the deformation of a Gaussian Schell-model (GSM) beam propagating through thermally induced turbulence. It is demonstrated that a GSM beam with lower coherence indeed experiences smaller beam wander and deformation than that with higher coherence. Our experimental results are explained by the beam wander theory of partially coherent beam reasonably, and will be useful in free-space optical communications.