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Beam Spreading in a Turbulent Medium

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Abstract

The Kolmogorov spectrum with its associated structure functions is generally used to study wave propagation in turbulent media. It is known, however, that this spectrum does not accurately represent the real atmosphere outside the inertial range. In this paper, the broadening of a focused gaussian beam is calculated, using instead a modified von Karman spectrum better to describe the medium. The Born approximation is also used, because it follows naturally from the use of this spectrum. The dependence of beam spreading on the outer scale of turbulence is obtained and the results generally reduce to those corresponding to the Kolmogorov spectrum and the Rytov approximation, which in fact do not depend on the outer scale of turbulence. The results can be applied to arbitrary source configurations or extended to include the calculation of other field quantities of interest.

© 1972 Optical Society of America

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