Generation of coherent and incoherent Airy beam arrays and experimental comparisons of their scintillation characteristics in atmospheric turbulence

We investigate, through numerical calculation and experiments, the incoherent combination of a 2D Airy beam array (ICCAB) and the coherent combination of a 2D Airy beam array (CCAB), respectively. Excellent experimental results are obtained for both ICCAB and CCAB. The on-axis scintillation indices of ICCAB and CCAB at the receiver plane in atmospheric turbulence are also compared experimentally. It is shown that ICCAB has a smaller scintillation index than that of CCAB in the same turbulent condition due to the coherence reduction of the constituent beamlets. The results obtained in this paper are useful for the development of beam propagation through atmosphere turbulence. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America