Influence of the least-squares phase on optical vortices in strongly scintillated beams

The optical vortices that exist in strongly scintillated beams make it difficult for conventional adaptive optics systems to remove the phase distortions. When the least-squares reconstructed phase is removed, the vortices still remain. However, we found that the removal of the least-squares phase induces a portion of the vortices to be annihilated during subsequent propagation, causing a reduction in the total number of vortices. This can be understood in terms of the restoration of equilibrium between explicit vortices, which are visible in the phase function, and vortex bound states, which are somehow encoded in the continuous phase fluctuations. Numerical simulations are provided to show that the total number of optical vortices in a strongly scintillated beam can be reduced significantly after a few steps of least-squares phase corrections.