Stress-optic measurements of SCHOTT laser glass

Stress-optic measurements of Nd- and Er-doped SCHOTT laser glasses were made at 1064 and 1550 nm, close to their respective lasing wavelengths. In addition, measurements of fused silica at 1064 nm serve as a useful benchmark owing to the existence of multiple studies which report on this material, including several from NBS/NIST. Owing to a currently unexplained discrepancy amongst our fused silica data using three different IR cameras, the results reported herein must be considered preliminary. Nevertheless, we believe the general trends reported herein for thermal lensing will hold, owing to a comparable increase in magnitude of the individual stress-optic parameters K_par and K_perp with increasing wavelength as previously observed for fused silica and as seen in our current data.