Photoelastic lensing effect in Ti:sapphire crystal pumped by high-energy pulses

We have built a setup with high temporal resolution to measure the very fast photoelastic lensing effect, which is on the scale of microseconds in a Ti:sapphire crystal pumped by very strong laser pulses (up to 5 J/cm2). The experimental results measured by this method and the real multimode beam profile taken by a CCD camera are applied to a three-dimensional crystal model to calculate one of the photoelastic constants of Ti:sapphire crystal, which is found to be p31=-0.03±0.01. This value is helpful to evaluate the photoelastic lensing effect in Ti:sapphire crystal for a laser beam polarized along the c axis, commonly used for laser amplification.