Turbulence-induced power drops as extreme events

Abstract Free-space optical communication links through the atmosphere are degraded mainly by the action of scintillation and beam wander. Both phenomena are responsible for fiber coupling misalignments at the receiver. Henceforth, the signal is corrupted by random power drops, which can be identified as extreme events, with particular statistical properties. In this work, we performed experiments and simulations to gain insight into understanding these extremes events and their relation with scintillation and wander at a receiver. Particularly, this sequence also inherits the same long term correlations of the original data.