Enhancing Complex\nLight Beam Propagation in Turbulent\nAtmosphere with Active Convolved Illumination

Robust transmission of spatial, spectral, or temporal\ndistributions\nof light through complex disordered media such as a turbulent atmosphere,\nbiological tissue, or turbid media remains a critical obstacle in\nmany research fields involving imaging, diagnosis, sensing, and communications.\nInspired from a virtual-gain technique for loss compensation in metamaterials,\nactive convolved illumination (ACI) has been recently proposed as\na ubiquitous optical compensation technique to significantly enhance\ninformation transport and hence data acquisition across lossy, noisy,\nor distorting media. The enhancement is achieved with an auxiliary\nsource, which is correlated with the ground truth and ideally, when\nsuperimposed with the latter, perfectly compensates for any distortion\nincurred during the transmission process. In this work, we propose\nthe first framework to implement ACI for robust coherent light transmission\nthrough a turbulent atmosphere. The auxiliary source is formulated\nfrom a reciprocal space characterization of the speckle pattern from\na guide star or pilot beam. The proposed method can maintain high-fidelity\nwave propagation under moderately anisoplanatic conditions with an\nimpressive 20-fold enhancement compared to the resolution limit of\nthe turbulent atmosphere. We outline potential strategies to extend\nthe framework to include dynamic turbulence and scattering effects.\nThis work introduces a powerful tool for robust light transmission\nthrough disordered media and potentially can be seamlessly integrated\nwith existing techniques and further extended to the broad spectrum\nof statistical sciences.