Scintillation effects on images by adaptive synthetic apertures in the atmosphere

The effect of amplitude fluctuations, scintillation, in adaptive optics Synthetic Systems is studied, for the first time in the literature to our knowledge. The effect on the images of adaptive synthetic apertures in the atmosphere is investigated. Initially, a theory is developed for a simple two elements synthetic aperture in the presence of intensity fluctuations and in both cases of total or partial phase correction. Then the theory is extended to a linear array and then to a rectangular array, of NxM elements, and subsequently to large continuous apertures. It appears that the scintillation effect can be large in the case of arrays and complete phase correction, lowering the Strehl ratio by a factor that depends on the scintillation intensity. Numerical evaluations in the case of a rectangular 3x3 array were made, showing that the Strehl ratio reduces to 0.81 for scintillation index i=1 and to 0.74 in the case i=2.