ERRORS CAUSED BY BASE-LINE OFFSET AND NOISE IN THE ESTIMATION OF EXPONENTIAL LIFETIMES

We have investigated errors and their sources in exponential-parameter estimation. This investigation was part of ongoing research in thermal metrology using the temperature-dependent fluorescence lifetime of rare-earth-doped ceramic phosphors. We have found that noise and baseline offset are the dominant sources of error in our experiments. In this note, we present the dependence of errors in exponential-lifetime estimates upon baseline offset and noise, as determined by the Monte Carlo simulation of Marquardt least-squared-error algorithms. These simulation results are validated by a Kullback-Leibler stochastic-distance model. We also demonstrate the necessity of estimating the baseline for accurate lifetime estimation.