Simultaneous optical and photoacoustic measurement of nonlinear absorption

Abstract

A measurement technique to perform optical Z-scan and photoacoustic Z-scan simultaneously called OPAZ-scan is demonstrated. It is found that the simultaneous measurement of the optical and photoacoustic Z-scan signals provides substantially better insight into the mechanism of optical nonlinearity. The system is able to identify mixed nonlinear processes within a mixture of nonlinear scattering species and nonlinear absorbers.