Digital turbulence compensation of free space optical link with multimode optical amplifier

We demonstrate digital turbulence compensation using a 12-spatial mode digital coherent receiver with a multimode preamplifier that provides a 6-dB sensitivity improvement. This combination acts similarly to ideal lossless adaptive optics. Coherent superposition of 12 spatial-modes reduced median BER from 0.1 to 1×10?5 compared to traditional single-mode detection.