We study the paraxial wave equation with a randomly perturbed index of refraction, which can model the propagation of a wave beam in a turbulent medium. The random perturbation is a stationary and isotropic process with a general form of the covariance that may or may not be integrable. We focus attention mostly on the nonintegrable case, which corresponds to a random perturbation with long-range correlations, that is, relevant for propagation through a cloudy turbulent atmosphere. The analysis is carried out in a high-frequency regime where the forward scattering approximation holds. It reveals that the randomization of the wave field is multiscale: The travel time of the wave front is randomized at short distances of propagation, and it can be described by a fractional Brownian motion. The wave field observed in the random travel time frame is affected by the random perturbations at long distances, and it is described by a Schr\"odinger-type equation driven by a standard Brownian field. We use these results to quantify how scattering leads to decorrelation of the spatial and spectral components of the wave field and to a deformation of the pulse emitted by the source. These are important questions for applications, such as imaging and free space communications with pulsed laser beams through a turbulent atmosphere. We also compare the results with those used in the optics literature, which are based on the Kolmogorov model of turbulence. We show explicitly that the commonly used approximations for the decorrelation of spatial and spectral components are appropriate for the Kolmogorov model but fail for models with long-range correlations.
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Speckle Memory Effect in the Frequency Domain and Stability in Time-Reversal Experiments
When waves propagate through a complex medium like the turbulent atmosphere the wave field becomes incoherent and the wave intensity forms a complex speckle pattern. In this paper we study a speckle memory effect in the frequency domain and some of its consequences. This effect means that certain properties of the speckle pattern produced by wave transmission through a randomly scattering medium is preserved when shifting the frequency of the illumination. The speckle memory effect is characterized via a detailed novel analysis of the fourth-order moment of the random paraxial Green's function at four different frequencies. We arrive at a precise characterization of the frequency memory effect and what governs the strength of the memory. As an application we quantify the statistical stability of time-reversal wave refocusing through a randomly scattering medium in the paraxial or beam regime. Time reversal refers to the situation when a transmitted wave field is recorded on a time-reversal mirror then time reversed and sent back into the complex medium. The re-emitted wave field then refocuses at the original source point. We compute the mean of the refocused wave and identify a novel quantitative description of its variance in terms of the radius of the time-reversal mirror, the size of its elements, the source bandwidth, and the statistics of the random medium fluctuations.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2010046
- PAR ID:
- 10475953
- Publisher / Repository:
- SIAM MMS
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Multiscale Modeling & Simulation
- Volume:
- 21
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1540-3459
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 80 to 118
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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