Experimental study of the transport characteristics of fractional-order vortex beams in a turbulent atmosphere simulator

Fractional vortex beams have attracted increasing attention due to their complex yet intriguing physical properties, such as radial notch intensity distribution and higher degrees of modulation in orbital angular momentum. In this study, we experimentally investigated and compared the beam spread and beam wander characteristics of fractional-order vortex beams with those of integer-order vortex beams after passing through a turbulent atmosphere simulator with varying turbulence intensities. Our results revealed that the beam spread of both fractional-order and integer-order vortex beams increased in a stepwise manner with the topological charge number, indicating that a larger topological charge number resulted in more severe beam spread. Interestingly, we observed that the beam radius of fractional-order vortex beams between two adjacent integer orders initially grew slowly and then rapidly before finally stabilizing into a curvilinear growth trend. This is in contrast to the linear growth trend exhibited by the beam radius of integer-order vortex beams. Furthermore, we found that the growth of the beam radius of half-integer-order vortex beams followed the linear growth trend of the beam radius of integer-order vortex beams. When the integer part of the topological charge was fixed, we observed that stronger turbulence resulted in more severe beam wander for both integer-order and fractional-order vortex beams, with the variance of the center-of-mass drift following the same growth curve. However, when the turbulence intensity is constant, both integer-order and fractional-order vortex beams exhibit a weaker beam wander effect with increasing topological charge. Our findings may provide valuable insights for applications such as optical communication and optical measurement using fractional-order vortex beams.