Measurement of pump-induced transient lensing in a cryogenically-cooled high average power Ti:sapphire amplifier.

The transient thermal lensing in a liquid-nitrogren cooled kilohertz multipass amplifier is quantitatively measured with spatially-resolved Fourier transform spectral interferometry. A pump-probe arrangement allows the observation of a polarization-dependent non-thermal component following the fluorescence timescale: additional cooling would not suppress this residual lensing. We also observe a time-dependent thermal component that has a timescale sufficiently fast to indicate that there is cooling between shots even at a repetition rate of 1 kHz. The value of pump-induced lensing would be underestimated when performing time-averaged measurements of pump-induced phase shifts.