text: Photothermal deflection spectroscopy is a kind of spectroscopy that measures the change in refractive index due to heating of a medium by light. It works via a sort of "mirage effect"  where a refractive index gradient exists adjacent to the test sample surface. A probe laser beam is refracted or bent in a manner proportional to the temperature gradient of the transparent medium near the surface. From this deflection, a measure of the absorbed excitation radiation can be determined. The technique is useful when studying optically thin samples, because sensitive measurements can be obtained of whether absorption is occurring. It is of value in situations where "pass through" or transmission spectroscopy can't be used.
  There are two main forms of PDS: Collinear and Transverse. Collinear PDS was introduced in a 1980 paper by A.C. Boccara, D. Fournier, et al. In collinear, two beams pass through and intersect in a medium. The pump beam heats the material and the probe beam is deflected. This technique only works for transparent media. In transverse, the pump beam heats come in normal to the surface, and the probe beam passes parallel. In a variation on this, the probe beam may reflect off the surface, and measure buckling due to heating. Transverse PDS can be done in Nitrogen, but better performance is gained in a liquid cell: usually an inert, non-absorbing material such as a perfluorocarbon is used.
  In both collinear and transverse PDS, the surface is heated using a periodically modulated light source, such as an optical beam passing through a mechanical chopper or regulated with a function generator. A lock-in amplifier is then used to measure deflections found at the modulation frequency. Another scheme uses a pulsed laser as the excitation source. In that case, a boxcar average can be used to measure the temporal deflection of the probe beam to the excitation radiation. The signal falls off exponentially as a function of frequency, so frequencies around 1-10 hertz are frequently used. A full theoretical analysis of the PDS system was published by Jackson, Amer, et al. in 1981. The same paper also discussed the use of PDS as a form of microscopy, called "Photothermal Deflection Microscopy", which can yield information about impurities and the surface topology of materials.
  PDS analysis of thin films can also be performed using a patterned substrate that supports optical resonances, such as guided-mode resonance and whispering-gallery modes. The probe beam is coupled into a resonant mode and the coupling efficiency is highly sensitive to the incidence angle. Due to the photoheating effect, the coupling efficiency is changed and characterized to indicate the thin film absorption.