Data analysis in pulsed-laser, time-resolved photoacoustics: evaluation of errors distribution and confidence intervals

Real time deconvolution of photoacoustic waveforms using nonlinear least squares methods has been successfully used to analyze the temporal profile of the heat released by molecular excited states. In the present work we investigate the statistical distribution of the errors by which the photoacoustic signal is affected. We introduce the χ2 test to judge the goodness of fitting and obtain the confidence intervals of the recovered parameters