Temperature measurement was initially done by Basset using an optical pyrometer to measure the intensity of the incandescent light from the sample. Colleagues at UC Berkeley were better able to utilize the black-body radiation and more accurately measure the temperature. The hot spot produced by the laser also created large thermal gradients in between the portions of sample that were hit by the focused laser and those that were not. The solution to this problem is ongoing but advances have been made with the introduction of a double-sided approach.