Coherent optical array receivers for the mitigation of atmospheric turbulence and speckle effects

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.