Evolution of the optical vortex density in phase corrected speckle fields

Abstract

In an attempt to understand the process whereby the phase modulation due to atmospheric turbulance causes phase singularities (also called optical vortices), the authors investigated the effect of phase perturbations in speckle beams. They perturb the phase by removing the continuous part of the phase from a speckle field. While optical vortices are annihilated and created at equal rates in a speckle field, these rates vary in different way as a result of the phase perturbations. This allows one to determine the characteristics scales associated with these processes. Here the authors report the initial results and show how one can represent the evolution of the vortex density in the paraxial limit.