Miguel Alonso, beginning his term as Editor-in-Chief, looks forward to continuing Optics Letters’ tradition of serving the optics and photonics community and publishing high-impact short communications.

When high-power lasers are used, the absorption in optical components can lead to distortion and depolarization of a beam, or even damage of components. Photothermal deflection and interferometric calorimetry permit the quantification of the thermal absorption $A_T$ of the laser flux in transparent materials by the measurement of the deflection or distortion of a probe beam caused by the propagation of a pump laser in the material. The purpose of this Letter is to provide a method to measure the absorption of a highly transparent material assisted by a thermal modeling.