Compensation of scintillation with a phase-only adaptive optic

To compensate for scintillation we allow the real. nonnegative field in an aperture to propagate a distance z toward a detector, where the field will be complex. There, me modify its phase to emulate that of a clear aperture. The modified field that is propagated to the detector is nearly diffraction limited. No light is lost, and the Strehl ratio is improved substantially. We show how to modify the phase, and we present a computer simulation. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.