Receiver-aperture averaging effects for the intensity fluctuation of a beam wave in the turbulent atmosphere

Using a Gaussian weighting function for the receiver aperture, we obtain a closed-form representation for the receiver-aperture averaging effect for the intensity fluctuation of a beam wave in the turbulent atmosphere. It is shown that, unlike for the plane-wave case, the power scintillations do not always decrease when the receiver aperture is increased. The reasons are that (1) the intensity fluctuations on the axis for a coherent beam-wave source are smaller than these off the axis and (2) the averaging effect cannot show up when the total beam is within a coherent patch (i.e., the coherence length is larger than the beamwidth).