Abstract
Directly measuring thermal focal length is important for designing and optimizing the mode locking oscillator, especially for a 2-μm mode-locking laser. In this paper, we propose a novel interferometric method for measuring the thermal focal length in a 2-μm mode-locking laser. This method could give a precise measurement of the thermal focal length inside a long-folded oscillator in both lasing and non-lasing operation. We also theoretically calculate the thermal focal length based on the temperature distribution inside the laser crystal, which matches well with the experimental result
Paraxial focal length measurement method with a simple apparatus
