Home – Home – Jornals – Atmospheric and Oceanic Optics 2025 number 12

This work is devoted to the development and experimental verification of effective methods for compensating for the dynamic atmospheric distortions of a laser beam propagating through a turbulent medium. The paper presents the results of a laboratory experiment on the correction of wavefront distortions of laser radiation propagating along a turbulent path in a pavilion. Turbulence was simulated using a fan heater supplying warm air perpendicular to the beam propagation. Distortion compensation was performed using an adaptive optics system, including a wavefront tilt corrector and a bimorph deformable mirror. The system efficiency was assessed by analyzing the far-field intensity distribution. It is shown that the generated turbulent distortions are spectrally similar to Kolmogorov turbulence with a bandwidth of about 30 Hz. It is found that for effective compensation of wavefront aberrations, the operating frequency of the adaptive optics system should be 20-30 times higher than the turbulence bandwidth. At a system operating frequency of 1 kHz, the beam divergence was reduced to 1.4 of the diffraction limit, and by increasing the frequency to 2 kHz, a beam stabilization accuracy of 5 mrad can be achieved using an FPGA. The results of this work can be used to design high-performance systems related to the propagation of laser radiation in a turbulent medium.