Performance and applications of optical pin beams in turbulent long-range free space optical communications

Optical Pin Beams (OPBs) are a promising candidate for realizing turbulence-resilient long-distance free-space optical communication links spanning hundreds of kilometers. In this work, we introduce an unified theoretical model to describe the propagation of OPBs and present comprehensive simulation results based on many realizations and link budget analyses for varying turbulence strengths. For reference, we compare the performance of the OPBs to weakly diverging and focusing Gaussian beams. For a 100 km long air-to-air link,10 km above sea level, our simulation results show that OPBs offer an improved link budget of up to 8.6 dB and enhanced beam wander statistics of up to 3 dB compared to the considered Gaussian beams. Additionally, we identified a quadratic relationship between the transmitter aperture diameter and the maximum achievable distances, which is crucial in deciding the suitability of OPBs for a given application scenario.