Propagation of "exotic" laser beams in conditions of atmospheric turbulence and thermal blooming effects

Analysis and numerical modeling of "exotic" laser beam propagation through inhomogeneous atmospheric media is performed. The exotic beam is synthesized by introducing an additional periodical dynamically changing phase modulation to a conventional outgoing beam base. The propagation media model includes a set of thin phase distorting layers corresponding to atmospheric turbulence-induced distortions and non-stationary nonlinear layers describing the thermal blooming effects that accompany high-energy laser beam propagation in a moving propagation medium. The exotic beam structure is optimized to have maximum energy inside the diffraction-limited size area on the target plane. Compared with propagation of conventional laser beams, the exotic beam exhibits better beam quality metrics on the target plane such as maximum intensity, centroid intensity, and energy in the vicinity of the maximum beam intensity and the centroid.