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.