Photothermal Microscopy

An accessory for a commercial optical microscope was implemented to map the thermal diffusivity of the sample with high spatial resolution. The system is based in the photothermal technique recently developed by the group. It consists in the measurement with a probe laser of the surface curvature induced by the heat delivered by a modulated pump laser. A lock-in detection technique provides the signal amplitude and phase as a function of the modulation frequency. The accessory was mounted on the camera port of a metallographic microscope Olympus BX51. Results obtained on different samples are presented.