Propagation of Laguerre-Gaussian beams through underwater optical turbulence

In the ocean, underwater currents are driven by various natural effects attributed to heat transfer through water. The movement of heat subsequently affects light propagation due to changes in the water’s refractive index leading to optical phase distortions. Applications implementing laser beams containing structured phase profiles are prone to being distorted by this underwater optical turbulence. Typical distortions of these beams can include beam wander, intensity and phase variations, and beam spreading that can limit their effectiveness for applications including free-space optical communication, imaging, or sensing. Experimental and theoretical studies have shown optical vortices, a form of structured light, propagate differently through optical turbulence compared with Gaussian beams. Changes in propagation are observed by varying the amount of Orbital Angular Momentum (OAM) a vortex beam carries that increases the beam size as OAM increases. This experimental study intends to fairly compare Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) beams to Gaussian beams after propagation through underwater turbulence by normalizing the initial beam size using the RMS radius. The metrics chosen are the mean scintillation, on-axis intensity, and intensity correlation. Results show the scintillation and on-axis intensity, when chosen at locations along the LG beam annuli, are similar for different LG beams. When the initial beam waist is normalized, the speckle field correlation width and peak correlation energy decreases as RMS radius increases. These results show that structured light is not independent of the effects of beam size and divergence, similar to Gaussian beams, to determine propagation effectiveness or robustness.