Phase fluctuations in waves reflected from a phase-conjugate mirror in a randomly inhomogeneous medium

We investigate the statistical characteristics of the phase of a wave propagating along a ranging path that includes a phase-conjugate mirror through a medium whose complex permittivity ε varies randomly. We obtain expressions for the mean change and variance of fluctuations in the phase of a plane wave. We show that phase fluctuations caused by the random changes of the imaginary part of ε are not canceled by the phase-conjugate mirror. We obtain conditions for the appearance of enhanced backward scattering in comparison with the mean phase and variance of phase fluctuations for the reflected wave in this absorbing, randomly inhomogeneous medium.