Efficient split-step modeling for imaging through atmospheric turbulence

We develop a prescription for constructing split-step models for computationally efficient numerical propagation of optical fields through distributed atmospheric phase screens in imaging geometries with both an aperture stop and a field stop. We use phase-space optics to show that our prescription yields efficient spatial sampling values, efficient in the sense that they closely match the minimum space-bandwidth product requirements for sampling a generic speckled field that passes through both stops. We also compute the computational complexity for propagating fields through our split-step models using fast Fourier transform methods. Compared with a typical split-step model, our efficient prescription provides more than a 6× reduction in computational complexity with excellent fidelity.