Intelligent multichannel data‐acquisition system for pulsed laser applications

A microcomputer‐controlled data‐acquisition system which is readily adapted to a wide variety of pulsed laser applications is described. Signals are sampled by commercially available gated integrators. Multichannel operation allows data to be normalized to a reference beam intensity, a necessity due to the pulse‐to‐pulse fluctuations of many pulsed lasers. Data are acquired and stored independently for each pulse. The advantages of postacquisition processing versus pulse‐to‐pulse averaging are demonstrated by an example of measurements on a nonlinear system.