Scintillations of incoherent flat-topped Gaussian source field in turbulence.

The intensity fluctuations of incoherent flat-topped Gaussian beams are evaluated when such sources are used in weakly turbulent horizontal atmospheric links. The formulation is developed for a detector having a response time much longer than the source coherence time. The flat-topped Gaussian profile is obtained by superposing many Gaussian beams, then the incoherence is introduced through delta correlation in space.