Modeling optical memory effects with phase screens

During the last decade, optical memory effects have been explored extensively for various applications. In this letter we propose phase screen models to facilitate the analysis and the simulation of wave propagation through optical media that exhibits memory effects. We show that the classical optical memory effect, which implies tilt wave correlations of the input and the scattered fields, can be readily modeled by a single random phase screen. For the recently discovered generalized optical memory effect, which implies the existence of shift wave correlations in addition to the tilt correlation, we propose an appropriate generalized random phase screen model.