Experimental demonstration of structural robustness of spatially partially coherent fields in turbulence

Structured fields that are spatially completely coherent have been extensively studied in the context of long-distance optical communication, as the structure in the intensity profile of such fields is used for encoding information. This method of doing optical communication works very well in the absence of turbulence. However, in the presence of turbulence, the intensity structures of such fields start to degrade because of the complete spatial coherence of the field, and this structural degradation increases with the increase in turbulence strength. On the other hand, several theoretical studies have now shown that the structured fields that are spatially only partially coherent are less affected by turbulence. However, to the best of our knowledge, no such experimental demonstration has been reported until now. In this Letter, we experimentally demonstrate the structural robustness of partially coherent fields in the presence of turbulence, and we show that for a given turbulence strength, the structural robustness of a partially coherent field increases as the spatial coherence length of the field is decreased.