The interferometric measurement of thermal lens effect in a LD pumped Tm-doped bulk laser

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