Numerical investigation of short-pulse laser radiation propagation in a turbulent atmosphere

An algorithm is presented for the numerical simulation of short-pulse optical radiation propagation in a turbulent atmosphere on the basis of the solution to the parabolic wave equation for the complex spectral amplitude of the wave field by the split-step method. We present examples of the use of this algorithm for simulating the propagation of a pulsed coherent spatially limited beam and a plane wave. It is shown that in the regime of strong optical turbulence the relative variance of fluctuations of energy density of femtosecond radiation becomes much smaller than the relative variance of the intensity of cw radiation.