Comparison of theories describing the photodeflection detection in photothermal experiments: The complex geometrical optics, the ray model and the wave geometrical optics

Abstract

In the work the comparison of the ray theory, the wave theory with the complex ray theory is presented. The results of the comparison are shown on graphs of the photodeflection signal dependence on some parameters of the experimental setup. There was pointed out in the paper that the differencies between all presented theories occur for the probe beam radius a comparable with the length of the thermal wave λ g .