Scintillation of Airy beam arrays in atmospheric turbulence

We investigate the scintillation properties of Airy beam arrays in atmospheric turbulence. By utilizing the self-bending propagation property of Airy beams, the constituent beamlets propagate through relatively independent regions of turbulence but still largely overlap at the on-axis detector. Through numeric simulations, it is shown that the scintillation of an Airy beam array is significantly reduced and close to the theoretical minimum. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America