Intensity fluctuations of multimode laser beams in underwater medium

In an oceanic optical communications link, the received intensity fluctuations, quantified by the scintillation index, are formulated and evaluated when a multimode laser is used. The variations of the scintillation index versus the oceanic turbulence parameters are examined for different multimode laser structures. Oceanic turbulence parameters used are the rate of dissipation of kinetic energy per unit mass of fluid, the rate of dissipation of mean-squared temperature, the Kolmogorov inner scale, and the parameter w that defines the ratio of temperature to salinity contributions to the refractive index spectrum. The results in this paper can be used to improve performance in the design of oceanic optical communications links. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America