Temporal broadening and scintillations of ultrashort optical pulses

The: purpose of this paper is to study the temporal broadening and temporal scintillations of ultrashort optical pulses. We present the general formulation of the temporal broadening and scintillation index of ultrashort (femtosecond) space-time Gaussian pulses propagating through weak optical turbulence and derive analytic approximations for the near- and far-hell zones. We then apply the results to cross-link, uplink and downlink communication channels in a laser satellite communication system. We show that both the temporal broadening and scintillations depend mainly on the strength of optical turbulence and the outer scale and increase with these parameters. We also show that 10-30 fs pulses broaden significantly more and have greater scintillations than wide pulses. Furthermore, the horizontal and vertical/slant path temporal broadening are identical and the temporal scintillation indices exhibit similar behaviour.