Rodney W. Leonhardt

Rodney W. Leonhardt is the author of a2004 National Institute of Standards and Technology report on measurement calibration of low-level pulsed-laser radiometers at a wavelength of1.06micrometres. It treats laser pulse energy and peak power as separate measurement quantities and describes the apparatus and measurement uncertainty needed to transfer a laboratory reference to a test instrument.^[ref]

The pulse-energy procedure uses a modulated laser, a calibrated beam splitter arrangement, a relatively slow thermal reference and a fast test radiometer. The reference accumulates energy over many pulses. Pulse repetition rate and the illumination interval determine the pulse count; the splitter ratio transfers the reference energy to the lower-energy test beam. The thermal detector need not resolve individual pulses.^[ref]

For an original idealized transfer calculation, let the reference receive a total $E_{\mathrm{ref}}=1\mu \mathrm{J}$ over $N=1000$ equal pulses. Define $B=100$ as the reference-to-test beam energy ratio. The average energy per test pulse isIf the calibrated radiometer's selected output measure is0.20volts, the corresponding energy-per-output coefficient would be50picojoules per volt. These invented values explain the transfer arithmetic and do not reproduce the report's calibration results.

The output measure must be specified together with its coefficient. Leonhardt's report discusses offsets in the integrating-amplifier waveform and use of peak-to-peak electric potential difference as a readout. Its peak-power procedure separately compares continuous and pulsed conditions.^[ref] The work illustrates how a measurement becomes reproducible by recording the optical transfer and electrical readout conventions, rather than only stating a detector sensitivity.