Temperature determination for nanosecond pulsed laser heating

Materials can be heated to thousands of degrees Kelvin using a high power focused laser beam. For continuous-wave laser heating the temperature can be remotely measured to a high precision by fitting the spectral irradiance to a blackbody curve. Heating with a pulsed laser has a number of advantages, but the temperature rises and falls in times measured in nanoseconds, which would require fast electronics and tedious procedures to determine the temperature by measuring the blackbody curve. We present a method of temperature determination using time-averaged measurements with a charge-coupled-device detector. The method is tested on fixed points (the melting of stainless steel and platinum), and provides accurate easy temperature determinations. (C) 2003 American Institute of Physics.