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Thermal-Lens Model Compared With The Sheik-Bahae Formalism In Interpreting Z-Scan Experiments On Lyotropic Liquid Crystals, Fabio Luiz Sant'anna Cuppo, Antonio Martins Figueiredo Neto, Sergio Leonardo Gomez, Peter Palffy-Muhoray

Peter Palffy-Muhoray

We carried out Z-scan measurements on lyotropic liquid crystals and on lyotropic liquid crystals doped with ferrofluid. In these experiments, the sample is translated through the focal region of a focused Gaussian laser beam. The dependence of the far-field intensity on sample position due to intensity-dependent optical nonlinearities has been analyzed on the basis of the thermal-lens model of Gordon et al. and the Gaussian decomposition analysis of Sheik-Bahae et al. The thermal-lens model is nonlocal in space and time, whereas the Gaussian decomposition is predicated on a strictly local response. We compare the goodness of fit of the predictions …