3 Things To Know About The Average Power Of Pulsed Lasers

If you owned a fleet of delivery trucks, how much would it actually help you to know just the average delivery time per parcel? On a fast day, what could you really conclude? Are drivers getting lucky? Using less traffic-prone routes? Driving outside of rush hour? Stopping for coffee less often? Pushing the trucks way past the speeding limits? Hard to say…

Considering just the average power of a pulsed laser is a similar story. Yes, it gives you some indication of what’s going on, but that may not be enough to improve your processes.

AVERAGE POWER IS NOT ENOUGH!

Ironically, the first thing to know about the average power of pulsed lasers is that knowing just the average power is usually not enough!

We’ll see why peak power is a more useful spec, and we’ll give you a way to approximate it based on average power.