Use of a partially coherent transmitter beam to improve the statistics of received power in a free-space optical communication system: theory and experimental results

Controlling the spatial coherence of the transmitted beam has been suggested as a means of improving the statistics of the received power in long-range free-space optical communications systems. We present an experiment demonstrating the concept of transmitting a partially spatial coherent beam through a turbulent path in a lab setting to overcome long-term dropouts in the received power. It is demonstrated both theoretically and experimentally that using a partially spatial coherent beam can decrease the scintillation index by ∼ 50% and the mean intensity in the simulation by ∼ 90% regardless of turbulence strength, when compared to the intensity of a fully coherent source in turbulence.

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