Beam wander of partially coherent array beams propagating bidirectionally through atmospheric turbulence and plasma...

The beam wander of partially coherent array beams propagating bidirectionally through atmospheric turbulence and plasma channels in horizontal and slant links has been investigated. In horizontal link, the beam wander of the Gaussian Shell-model (GSM) array beams for both forward and reverse transmissions is studied, and the beam wander for reverse transmission is smaller than that for forward transmission under the same conditions. However, in a slant link, only the uplink is considered because the beam wander in the downlink can be disregarded. The effects of atmospheric turbulence and beam parameters on beam wander are studied numerically in detail. The results demonstrate that the beam wander of GSM array beams is closely related to beam orders, beam widths, beamlet separation distances, transverse spatial coherence widths, zenith angles, refractive index structure constants, generalized exponent parameters, and outer scale of the atmospheric turbulence. The impact of atmospheric turbulence and plasma on the beam wander can be reduced by selecting appropriate parameters for the GSM array beams. This outcome has significant potential for application in free-space optical communications.