Fe. Hernandez et al., SENSITIVITY OF THE TOTAL BEAM PROFILE DISTORTION Z-SCAN FOR THE MEASUREMENT OF NONLINEAR REFRACTION, Optics communications, 134(1-6), 1997, pp. 529-536
A comparison of the sensitivity of the recently proposed total beam pr
ofile distortion Z-scan to the well-known Z-scan and Eclipsing Z-scan
techniques is presented. Experimental sensitivities are measured in th
e picosecond pulsed regime for studying Kerr nonlinearity in CS2 and i
n the cw-regime for studying thermal nonlinear refraction in an ethano
l solution of malachite green. It is shown that the sensitivity of the
new method is enhanced by more than one order of magnitude with respe
ct to the usual Z-scan and more than five times with respect to the Ec
lipsing Z-scan.