Atmospheric Turbulence Intermittent Wave Propagation

Because of the effects of atmospheric turbulence, the quality of a wave beam will deteriorate seriously when it propagates through the atmosphere. Under the guideline of the theory to wave propagation in turbulent media which was established by Tartaskii and other Russian scientists in the middle of the latest century, the optical effects of turbulence is considered according to the recent developments in the fields of turbulence and atmospheric turbulence in this paper.The intermittency, one of the core contents in the modern turbulence theory, is in fact an essential character to turbulence, and it has more rich and varied manifestations under the background of the more wide scales of the atmospheric turbulence. Therefore, when studying the properties of light propagating in the atmosphere, we ought not to turn a blind eye to this important character of atmospheric turbulence. Besides the intermittency, many other aspects, such as the property of non-homogeneously changing with time and space, are also important properties to atmospheric turbulence and their effect to wave propagating in the atmosphere should also be considered. All these properties, including the intermittency, manifest themselves more obvious on the larger scales of atmospheric turbulence. Although it is still impossible to understand the essences of the above properties completely in these days, people have some elementary knowledge and have constructed many useful mathematical models on them. The models, including those about intermittency, about inner scale, about outer scale, about refractive profile, about wind, etc, can be applied to study the optical effects of the atmospheric turbulence, although they are only phenomenological models and cannot form strict theoretical system. In this paper, we will study the problem of light propagating in the atmospheric turbulence according the above models, and we will consider the optical effect of the turbulent intermittency emphatically.On one hand, all these models only describe parts of properties to turbulence, and can only applied special situations. On the other hand, most of these models are only fitting expressions to the experiment results and it is very difficult to apply them to practical problems. Based on the diversification and complexness of the atmospheric turbulence problems, the numerical method would be a better selection. The principal part of his paper is an elementary attempt to study the problem of light propagating in atmospheric turbulence by the method of numerical simulation. Except to simulate the light propagating in the atmospheric turbulence, we also construct a simplified adaptive optical system to simulate the compensation process to the turbulent optical effect.