Fast simulation of Strehl loss due to phase aberration for the sizing of adaptive optics in laser communications system design.

An approximation is derived for the phase Strehl of an aberrated wavefront based on uncorrelated random variates. Eliminating the requirement to generate correlated variates offers an orders-of-magnitude improvement in simulation speed, while yielding accuracy that may be sufficient for the preliminary sizing of adaptive optics (AO) in laser communications system design. Examples are presented comparing the performance of several AO subsystem sizes when correcting a wavefront aberrated by Kolmogorov turbulence.