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arXiv · 2606.16123

Spatiotemporal Tracking of Optical Speckles in Turbulent Atmospheric Propagation

Travis M. Crumpton·Luat T. Vuong
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Abstract

The speckle fields produced by optical beam propagation through atmospheric turbulence are typically described using ensemble-averaged intensity and coherence statistics, which obscure the speckle-level dynamics. Here, we investigate the spatiotemporal evolution of speckles generated during Gaussian beam propagation through turbulence by explicitly tracking them as discrete resolvable substructures. We quantify object-level persistence, transverse extent, and trajectories as functions of propagation distance, turbulence strength, and source-plane beam width. Under fixed detection criteria, we observe that a subset of these speckles exhibits measurable width statistics and persistence distributions whose form depends on turbulence strength and source-plane beam size. This object-level framework remains well-defined within the regime of strong turbulence and provides a complementary approach to characterizing turbulent propagation beyond conventional ensemble-averaged metrics.

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Travis M. Crumpton, Luat T. Vuong. 2026-06-15. Spatiotemporal Tracking of Optical Speckles in Turbulent Atmospheric Propagation. https://doi.org/10.1364/ao.599858

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