Evolutions of a ring Airy vortex beam and a ring Pearcey vortex beam in turbulent atmosphere and a comparative analysis of their channel efficiencies and OAM spectra

An optical vortex beam propagating through turbulent atmosphere encounters distortions in the wavefront that result in modal scattering. Abruptly autofocusing (AAF) beams with orbital angular momentum have gained significant attention due to their non-diffracting and self-healing nature. These warrant understanding of the behavior of these beams through turbulent atmosphere absolutely necessary. With this intuition, in the present work we investigate the behavior of two AAF beams, namely the ring Airy vortex beam (RAVB) and ring Pearcey vortex beam (RPVB) through the turbulent atmosphere in two cases—multiplexed and non-multiplexed. We propagate multiplexed as well as non-multiplexed RAVB and RPVB in different levels of turbulent atmosphere. In the non-multiplexed case, channel efficiency declines for both beams with increase in mode numbers. In the multiplexed case, increasing the gap between the mode sets results in a decrease in channel efficiency. We also report that in weak atmospheric turbulence RAVB outperforms RPVB in terms of channel efficiency. We use the optical transformation sorting (log-polar) method to demultiplex the optical beams at the output. Furthermore, we investigate and compare the orbital angular momentum (OAM) spectra of both beams in different levels of atmospheric turbulence and at different propagation distances. The comparison reveals that the spectra of RPVB are more dispersive as compared to those of RAVB.