Explicit and approximate theories of photothermal deformation in surface thermal lens technique

An explicit thermoelastic model is developed to describe the photothermal deformation of a coated sample excited by a cw modulated laser beam with a top-hat profile. The surface displacement obtained with this explicit model is compared to that obtained by an approximate model developed by Reichling and Gr?nbeck (J. Appl. Phys. 75, 1914 (1994)). Both thermoelastic models are then applied in a Fresnel diffraction based surface thermal lens (STL) theory. Numerical calculations are performed to investigate the differences between the explicit and approximate models in both surface displacement and STL signal. The simulation results show that the approximate model over-estimates the surface displacement and the corresponding STL signal amplitude. A decrease in the thermal diffusion length reduces the differences between the results obtained with the two thermoelastic models.