Pulse-Induced Thermal Lensing in Kerr Media

Abstract

The thermal lens effect induced by nanosecond laser pulses in a media having large Kerr nonlinearity is studied. It is shown that thermal lensing is affected by pump-beam self-focusing due to the Kerr nonlinearity, which increases the sensitivity of the thermal lens technique to detect small linear or nonlinear absorption.

Keywords

Thermal lensing Self-focusing Z-scan

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