Consistency of the directionality of partially coherent beams inturbulence expressed in terms of the angular spread and the far-field average intensity

Under the quadratic approximation of the Rytov's phase structure function, this paper derives the general closed-form expressions for the mean-squared width and the angular spread of partially coherent beams in turbulence. It finds that under a certain condition different types of partially coherent beams may have the same directionality as a fully coherent Gaussian beam in free space and also in atmospheric turbulence if the angular spread is chosen as the characteristic parameter of beam directionality. On the other hand, it shows that generally, the directionality of partially coherent beams expressed in terms of the angular spread is not consistent with that in terms of the normalized far-field average intensity distribution in free space, but the consistency can be achieved due to turbulence.