Enhancing Complex Light Beam Propagation in Turbulent Atmosphere with Active Convolved Illumination

Robust transmission of spatial, spectral, or temporal distributions of light through complex disordered media such as a turbulent atmosphere, biological tissue, or turbid media remains a critical obstacle in many research fields involving imaging, diagnosis, sensing, and communications. Inspired from a virtual-gain technique for loss compensation in metamaterials, active convolved illumination (ACI) has been recently proposed as a ubiquitous optical compensation technique to significantly enhance information transport and hence data acquisition across lossy, noisy, or distorting media. The enhancement is achieved with an auxiliary source, which is correlated with the ground truth and ideally, when superimposed with the latter, perfectly compensates for any distortion incurred during the transmission process. In this work, we propose the first framework to implement ACI for robust coherent light transmission through a turbulent atmosphere. The auxiliary source is formulated from a reciprocal space characterization of the speckle pattern from a guide star or pilot beam. The proposed method can maintain high-fidelity wave propagation under moderately anisoplanatic conditions with an impressive 20-fold enhancement compared to the resolution limit of the turbulent atmosphere. We outline potential strategies to extend the framework to include dynamic turbulence and scattering effects. This work introduces a powerful tool for robust light transmission through disordered media and potentially can be seamlessly integrated with existing techniques and further extended to the broad spectrum of statistical sciences.