Model-based wavefront measurement and compensation in atmospheric turbulence

The model-based method can measure phase aberration without special wavefront detectors. However, the influence of non-uniform beam intensity distribution was not considered, leading to non-negligible system errors. Moreover, no experiments were employed to verify its capability and practicability in atmospheric turbulence. This paper proposes the aberrated pupil method, which can enhance the accuracy of phase recovery by introducing an aberrated pupil function into the traditional model-based method. The effectiveness of the model-based phase measurement and compensation method was experimentally investigated and verified in the application of free-space optical communication. Compared with the traditional model-based method, the aberrated pupil method can reduce the coupling power loss caused by turbulence from 2.59 to 0.87 dB, resulting in a reduction of 1.72 dB. With coherent communication experiments, the model-based phase recovery method significantly improved the communication power budget by about 13.5 dB. The proposed method can measure and compensate for the phase aberration to significantly improve the communication quality of free-space optical communication.