Chopper z-scan technique for elliptic Gaussian beams

Abstract

This paper reports an improvement to the chopper z-scan technique for elliptic Gaussian beams. This improvement results in a higher sensitivity by measuring the ratio of eclipsing time to rotating period (duty cycle) of a chopper that eclipses the beam along the main axis. It is shown that the z-scan curve of the major axis is compressed along the z-axis. This compression factor is equal to the ratio between the minor and major axes. It was found that the normalized peak-valley difference with respect to the linear value does not depend on the axis along which eclipsing occurs.