Title

Coherent Optical Array Receivers For The Mitigation Of Atmospheric Turbulence And Speckle Effects

Authors

Authors

P. Gatt; T. P. Costello; D. A. Heimmermann; D. C. Castellanos; A. R. Weeks;C. M. Stickley

Comments

Authors: contact us about adding a copy of your work at STARS@ucf.edu

Abbreviated Journal Title

Appl. Optics

Keywords

Coherent Optical Array Receivers; Heterodyne Arrays; Space Diversity; Receivers; Coherent Optical Communications; Atmospheric Turbulence; Compensation; Electro-Optic Phase-Locked Loop; Heterodyne Detector Array; Lidar; Optics

Abstract

A description is given of the design, operation, and test over a 2-km path (roundtrip) of a continuous wave, coherent laser array receiver that uses two independent aperture-receivers whose intermediate frequencies are electro-optically co-phased in real time and then added as a proposed way to overcome effective aperture limitations imposed by atmospheric turbulence and to mitigate signal fading associated with atmospheric turbulence and speckle effects. The experiment resulted in a mean carrier-to-noise ratio increase of 1.8, which is within 1% of the theoretical predictions, when the two signals were phase locked, versus no increase without phase locking. Further, the carrier fading strength, or normalized carrier-to-noise ratio variance, was reduced by a factor of 0.53, which is within 2% of the theoretical prediction. The bandwidth of the electro-optic phase-locked loop was measured to be of the order of 600 Hz, which is adequate to compensate for atmospheric refractive turbulence fluctuations. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America

Journal Title

Applied Optics

Volume

35

Issue/Number

30

Publication Date

1-21-1995

Document Type

Article

Language

English

First Page

5999

Last Page

6009

WOS Identifier

WOS:A1996VN21200020

ISSN

0003-6935

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