Beam propagation through an optical system with the two-adaptive-optics configuration and beam shaping

Beam propagation through an optical system with the two-adaptive-optics configuration and beam shaping has been investigated. In theory, we analyzed beam propagation through the optical system in turbulent atmosphere and calculated performance of the optical system under the H-V 5/7 turbulent model, the ITU-R turbulent model, the Shanxi district turbulent model and the Hefei district turbulent model in China, respectively. The theoretical results showed that performance of the optical system can be significantly improved by beam shaping. With ideal adaptive optics correction precision, power efficiency of the received beam can be improved from 81.27% to 92.00%, and the system performance factor can be improved from 0.61 to 0.67 under the H-V 5/7 turbulent model. In experiment, we found an experimental optical system under the laboratory conditions by using two Liquid Crystal Spatial Light Modulators, and carried out the reduced-scale experiment. The experimental results showed that power efficiency of the received beam can be improved from 71.89% to 87.88%, and power proportion in the bucket with 5 pixels radius at the target can be improved from 44.53% to 52.78% by beam shaping.

► We study beam propagation through an optical system with beam shaping.
► We simulate performance of the optical system under four different turbulent models.
► We set up an experimental optical system based on two LC-SLMs in the laboratory.