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

    Authors

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

    Comments

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    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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