Self-healing behavior of Airy beam scattered from a turbulent boundary layer

Abstract Airy beam can persist its self-healing property even under perturbations such like scattering or blocking. In this paper we investigated whether such property persists in an aero-optic turbulence layer. We have studied the propagation behavior of a finite energy Airy beam after it undergoes scattering from finite volumes of respectively four different regions of a canonical compression ramp flow. We treated the scattering in the regime of first order approximation taking into account the relatively weak fluctuations present in the flow refractive index. However, our computational results show such perturbations lead to severe distortion or even destroying effects to the beam intensity distribution and the beam's self-healing property is absent. The physics behind these phenomena were discussed from the viewpoint of energy flows of the light fields. Our results may have great potential benefit to applications involving such peculiar beams.