Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

- in my opinion, the Introduction section is not organized too well. A more classical variant, when, first, the state of the art is given, and then the problem of the paper is stated is more convenient here as the problems of photothermal measurements and their possible novel solutions, as proposed by the authors, are more important for a potential reader.

- I believe that in such a fast-developing branch of spectroscopy as photothermics, some publications may be a bit outdated.

I do not object referring to Gordon's and Leite's papers but they mainly deal with in-cavity thermal lensing, not common external TLS, which was developed in late seventies (and only Long and Swofford's paper is cited), especially for physicochemical and chemical analysis studies.

Moreover, the reviews of 2015 and a relatively short note (2020) on the history of the techniques, though being high-quality papers, are not enough. And, in fact that references 1-3 are not really used, although their authors provide a lot of insight into crossed-beam thermal lensing, which is close to the subject of the manuscript. Thus, I suggest referring to more papers of the last three years as many novel papers and reviews have been published as well as papers on crossed-beam thermal lensing and more detailed discussion of references in the text (or the information from Ref. 1 at very least). Moreover, it will be quite relevant for this paper with this technique to show the recent advances underlining the novelty of this study.

- Moreover, the latest studies on convection in thermal lensing should be implemented with the first studies of these phenomena in late 1980s.

- I also highly recommend using more findings reported in these references not only in the Introduction but also in Discussion as the comparison with previously developed technique should not only be stated in the Introduction but discussed in enough detail.

- For consistency with other papers and to avoid ambiguity, I recommend changing the term 'pump' with 'excitation'. 

- Figure 9a as an illustration can be safely placed into a Supplementary, but the equation is of importance and should be provided with errors of both terms, not only the terms itself, with the number of points and probability value. This is very relevant for the paper as the problem of precision and accuracy of photothermal measurements is of prime importance. The same is for the last power calibration in Figure 8. The equation in the caption for Figure 5 should be fully presented as well. Please consult the standards like IUPAC for the presentation of liner equations.

- ther error values throughout the text cannot have more than 1 significant digits and corresponding values should be rounded up to match the decimal place in the error value.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his/her insightful comments and for pushing us on the references. We have made a combined response list which is the attached pdf file. Our responses are in red font in that document. Red and blue font is used in the revised version of the manuscript to indicate direct revisions stemming from the reviewer suggestions (red) and indirect revisions we have made (blue).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This reviewer has no comments on the manuscript.

Author Response

While the reviewer has no comments we have produced one document of our responses to all three reviewers. It is attached here as a pdf

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

liquids-2527462

Review of the article titled: 

''Photothermal Imaging of Transient and Steady State Convection Dynamics in Primary Alkanes''

 

by Johan Dominguez Lopez, M.W. Gealy, Darin J. Ulness

 

Liquids (ISSN 2673-8015).

 

Round 1

 

The abstract perfectly underlines the relevance of the presented research. 

1.     There are no respectable works cited since late 2022. Please provide a more representative reference list. Several recent reviews and research articles used PT approach. Please use the appropriate references to improve the quality of the work.

 

http://dx.doi.org/10.3367/UFNe.2021.05.038976;

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s43630-022-00327-8;

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mattod.2022.11.011;

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.0c07638#

 

2.     Abstract section. // This paper presents a novel photothermal spectroscopy technique // I'd recommended use much more appropriate phrase like improved technique.

3.     The novelty statements should be much more pointed out. Also, the aims of this work should be much clearer in introduction section. 

4.     Provide any information concerning the reproducibility of the results.

5.     Provide information about the mixture analysis. 50:50 of hexane and octane, for example.

6.     It's highly recommended provide graphical scheme of experiments.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for his/her insightful comments and for pushing us on the references. We have made a combined response list which is the attached pdf file. Our responses are in red font in that document. Red and blue font is used in the revised version of the manuscript to indicate direct revisions stemming from the reviewer suggestions (red) and indirect revisions we have made (blue).

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I have no further concerns. This paper ca be accepted as is.