Simulating effect of Turbulence on a Gaussian beam in a clean room environment

[soylentdeen]

Hi, I am trying to do some back-of-the-ol'-envelope calculations to help aid in some laboratory debugging. My background is in Adaptive Optics (CIAO on the ESO VLT), so i thought I would see if I could repurpose some of these tools. I was wonder if someone could tell me if I'm barking up the right tree (or, if I'm even in the right forest). Basically, the test setup is the following:

There is a relatively large (~100 mm) beam traveling from a collimator through a path of air in a clean room (ISO-5) to a telescope, where the beam is compressed/sent to a suite of instrumentation. We suspect that a portion of the issues were are seeing are due to turbulence distorting the wavefront across the beam. We would like to model this wavefront distortion to confirm our suspicions/investigate potential mitigation strategies.

Probably most of the use cases for AOTools are meant for light transmitting through the entire atmospheric column, but could we "ab"use AOTools objects/routines to simulate the imprinting of turbulence into a Gaussian beam/flat wavefront over a distance of say, 10 m? Would anyone have any suggestions as to where to start?

I have gotten to a point where I think I am getting something reasonable

Is it possible to extract from this phase map the Zernike components? From a cursory glance at the docs, it doesn't look like this is possible, but I may be misunderstanding things.

Oh, never mind, it looks like there is something in the aotools_tests that does what I am looking for