Pencil-beam approximation of fractional Fokker-Planck

Abstract: We consider the modeling of light beams propagating in highly forward-peaked turbulent media by fractional Fokker-Planck equations and their approximations by fractional Fermi pencil-beam models. We obtain an error estimate in a 1-Wasserstein distance for the latter model showing that beam spreading is well captured by the Fermi pencil-beam approximation in the small diffusion limit.