Gaussian beam photothermal single particle microscopy

We explore the intuitive lensing picture of laser-heated nanoparticles occurring in single particle photothermal (PT) microscopy. The effective focal length of the thermal lens (TL) is derived from a ray- optics treatment and used to transform the probing focused Gaussian beam with ABCD Gaussian matrix optics. The relative PT signal is obtained from the relative beam-waist change far from the TL. The analytical expression is semiquantitative, capable of describing the entire phenomenology of single particle PT microscopy, and shows that the signal is the product of the point-spread functions of the involved lasers times a linear function of the axial coordinate. The presented particularly simple and intuitive Gaussian beam lensing picture compares favorably to the experimental results for 60 nm gold nanoparticles and provides the prescription for optimum setup calibration. (c) 2012 Optical Society of America