Fluctuations of the propagating beam field in a lens waveguide

It is well known that light beams propagated through a turbulent medium such as the atmosphere or the air between optical lenses suffer fluctuations of the field in respect of its amplitude and phase. This paper investigates the fluctuation distributions of a laser beam propagating through a lens waveguide which consists of a sequence of optical lenses placed in a randomly inhomogeneous medium. By using a Rytov approximation approach, the mean-square values of fluctuations are obtained in terms of log-amplitude and phase of the beam field. The results show that as the light beam propagates through the lens waveguide, the mean-square fluctuations increase with periodic variations corresponding to a period of lens spacing and that a singular phenomenon of fluctuation reduction at each focus of the beam is evident at larger beam spot sizes.