Scintillation index of arbitrary vector beams in atmospheric turbulence

Vector beams having spatially nonuniform polarization distributions have recently been shown to mitigate turbulence-induced scintillation. In this work, we present a general formulation for the scintillation index of arbitrary vector beams in weak atmospheric turbulence by using the Rytov perturbation theory. Simulation results based on the split-step Fourier method confirm that our formulation accurately predicts the scintillation index of vector beams.