Fractional moments for investigating laser atmospheric scintillation statistics: application to amplitude fluctuations

In adaptive optics systems much attention is devoted to correct for phase fluctuations. Scintillation, that is amplitude fluctuations, is generally neglected as considered a source of small noise. In the case of strong scintillation, as can arise in horizontal laser propagation, this cannot be true and amplitude fluctuations can play an important role. Here, for the first time in the literature to our knowledge, we raise this problem and give a method, based on the fractional moments of the intensity, to obtain information on the probability distribution function, PdF, of the amplitude by measuring scintillation.