Geometrical Monte Carlo Simulation of Atmospheric Turbulence

摘要

Atmospheric turbulence has a significant impact on the quality of a laser beam propagating through the atmosphere over long distances. Turbulence causes intensity scintillation and beam wander from propagation through turbulent eddies of varying sizes and refractive index. This can severely impair the operation of target designation and Free-Space Optical (FSO) communications systems. In addition, experimenting on an FSO communication system is rather tedious and difficult. The interferences of plentiful elements affect the result and cause the experimental outcomes to have bigger error variance margins than they are supposed to have. Especially when we go into the stronger turbulence regimes the simulation and analysis of the turbulence induced beams require delicate attention. We propose a new geometrical model to assess the phase shift of a laser beam propagating through turbulence. The atmosphere along the laser beam propagation path will be modeled as a spatial distribution of spherical bubbles with refractive index discontinuity calculated from a Gaussian distribution with the mean value being the index of air. For each statistical representation of the atmosphere, the path of rays will be analyzed using geometrical optics. These Monte Carlo techniques will assess the phase shift as a summation of the phases that arrive at the same point at the receiver. Accordingly, there would be dark and bright spots at the receiver that give an idea regarding the intensity pattern without having to solve the wave equation. The Monte Carlo analysis will be compared with the predictions of wave theory.