Scintillation effects on wavefront sensing in the Rytov regime

This article presents an analysis of scintillation effects after propagation through atmospheric turbulence. It uses an expansion of the log-amplitude on the Zernike modes in the weak perturbation regime. An analytical evaluation of the error introduced by scintillation on wavefront slope measurements is then derived. For a typical profile corresponding to astronomical conditions, scintillation introduces a wavefront measurement error whose standard deviation is of the order of lambda /20 in the visible.