Effect of turbulent atmosphere on the on-axis average intensity of Pearcey–Gaussian beam

The propagation characteristics of the Pearcey–Gaussian (PG) beam in turbulent atmosphere are investigated in this paper. The Pearcey beam is a new kind of paraxial beam, based on the Pearcey function of catastrophe theory, which describes diffraction about a cusp caustic. By using the extended Huygens–Fresnel integral formula in the paraxial approximation and the Rytov theory, an analytical expression of axial intensity for the considered beam family is derived. Some numerical results for PG beam propagating in atmospheric turbulence are given by studying the influences of some factors, including incident beam parameters and turbulence strengths.