2. Theory
The proposed OA technique is based on the time-resolved detection of temporal PROFILES of OA signals excited in the medium under study by forward-propagating acoustic waves (Fig. 1). The rigorous and detailed description of the optoacoustic phenomena can be found in [17] and [37]. In this section, we demonstrate just a typical temporal PROFILE of the generated OA signal and shortly describe the information that can be extracted from the detected OA signal.