 Optical energy outside a time gate

Optical energy outside a time gate is the radiant energy excluded by a specified ideal temporal acceptance set $G$. For a nonnegative radiant power profile of finite positive total energy,The time-integral definition is the radiometric one.^[ref] This observable needs a gate boundary but no fitted separation into a main field and an optical pulse pedestal.

For an original three-pulse example, let an optical prepulse, main pulse and optical postpulse carry $5$, $12$ and $3\mathrm{nJ}$ respectively, with disjoint supports. A gate containing only the main pulse admits $12\mathrm{nJ}$ of $20\mathrm{nJ}$, so $f_{\mathrm{out}}=0.40$. Widening that gate to include the postpulse reduces the fraction to $0.25$. The optical waveform has not changed; the admitted observable has.

For a translated interval $G_{\delta }=[a+\delta ,b+\delta ]$ with continuous boundary values,Unequal power at the boundaries produces first-order sensitivity to a timing shift. Equal boundary values eliminate this derivative but need not eliminate higher-order loss; quadratic energy loss from centred Gaussian gate timing error gives an existing example.

The total-energy denominator must cover the excluded light too. If the acquisition window misses an unknown tail, pulse-energy interval from incomplete tail measurements supplies conditional bounds rather than an exactly known fraction. A detection time gate on an electrical detector trace also includes the detector impulse response and is not automatically an ideal gate on incoming optical power. A characterized optical response and a stated detector baseline subtraction are needed to compare the two.