Experimental study on phase compensation method based on autocorrelation in laser heterodyne detection

Spatial distortion phase seriously deteriorates the performance of heterodyne detection system. Effective phase compensation is necessary to reduce the impact of the distortion phase. Compared with the compensation method based on the combination of an optimization algorithm and sequence shifting, that by use of autocorrelation does not require repetitive iterations and avoids false alarms, resulting in better stability and real-time properties. In this paper, the distortion phase is generated by an atmospheric turbulence simulator to examine the performance of the new compensation method. The experiment results show that compared with the single point detector method, the new method can even increase the SNR by 50.3 dB, which confirms the effectiveness of the compensation method. Due to easy implementation and excellent performance, it is possible that the new method will become a universal means to compensate for the spatial distortion phase in the heterodyne detection.