Channel Capacity of Autofocusing Airy Vortex Beam in Turbulent Ocean

For practical underwater wireless communication links, one significant challenge is the random fluctuation of turbulence that will affect the link performance. In this work, we employ autofocusing Airy vortex beams (AAVBs) to characterize and mitigate oceanic turbulence, and the corresponding channel capacity in turbulent ocean is investigated. The most notable feature of AAVBs in turbulent ocean is the abrupt autofocus under the combined effects of self‐healing and self‐focusing, which leads to a complicated evolving behavior of the channel information capacity with propagation distance. Unlike nonautofocusing vortex beams, whose channel capacity monotonically declines with propagation distance in oceanic turbulence, the channel capacity of AAVB‐based links follows a decrease–increase–decrease pattern, corresponding, respectively, to the self‐accelerating, autofocusing, and diffusion regimes. Furthermore, three optical parameters related to the channel capacity of oceanic turbulence, i.e., topological charge (TC), radius of the primary ring, and exponential decaying factor, are discussed in detail. It indicates that AAVBs are better light sources’ candidates for mitigating the influences of oceanic turbulence on channel capacity and offers the possibilities to improve the channel capacity of optical vortex communication systems in underwater communication.