Abstract:
The effective radius of curvature of hyperbolic and sinusoidal Gaussian beams in free space and turbulent atmosphere is studied analytically and numerically. It is shown that the radius of curvature rises with growing source size, and changes slowly with wavelength. In general, given the same source and propagation settings, the beams can be listed in descending order of radius of curvature magnitudes as sinh Gaussian, cosh Gaussian, sine Gaussian, pure Gaussian and cos Gaussian beams. However, the radius of curvature and the difference of the radius of curvature between the different beams reduce with growing strength of turbulence because the beam's spatial phase distribution is destroyed by turbulence