Random optical frames in atmospheric turbulence

The behavior of the spectral density and the spectral degree of coherence of the recently introduced class of stochastic optical frames by Korotkova and Shchepakina (2014 Opt. Express 22 10622-633) is investigated on propagation in the clear-air isotropic atmospheric turbulence with von Karman power spectrum having varying slope, with the help of the extended Huygens-Fresnel integral. It is illustrated that for the suitable choice of the source parameters it is possible to form the required optical frame at a certain intermediate distance from the source plane, on the order of a kilometer for typical atmospheric conditions. However, for sufficiently large distances from the source, on the order of tens of kilometers, the frame starts to resemble a Gaussian profile.