Temperature histories of nanosecond pulsed laser heated soot particles of different primary particle size distributions were calculated using a single primary particle based heat and mass transfer model under conditions of a typical atmospheric laminar diffusion flame. The critical peak soot particle temperatures beyond which soot particle sublimation cannot be neglected were identified to be about 3300-3400 K. Knowledge of this critical soot particle temperature is required to conduct low-fluence laser-induced incandescence experiments in which soot sublimation is avoided. After the laser pulse, the temperature of smaller primary soot particles decreases faster than that of larger ones as a result of larger surface area-to-volume ratio. Unlike the common belief that the peak soot particle temperature is independent of the primary particle diameter, the numerical results indicate that this assumption is valid only when soot sublimation is negligible and for primary soot particle diameters greater than about 20 nm. The effective temperature of a soot particle ensemble having different primary particle diameters ill the laser probe Volume Was Calculated based on the ratio of the total thermal radiation intensities of soot particles at 400 and 780 nm to simulate the experimentally measured soot particle temperature using two-color optical pyrometry. In the non-sublimation regime, the initial effective temperature decay rate after the peak soot temperature is related to the Sauter mean diameter of the primary soot particle diameter distribution. At longer times, the effective temperatures of soot particle ensembles start to display different decay rates for different soot primary particle diameter distributions. A simple approach was proposed in this study to infer the two parameters of lognormal distributed primary soot particle diameter. Application of this approach was demonstrated in an atmospheric laminar ethylene diffusion flame with the inferred primary soot particle diameter distribution compared with independent ex situ measurement. Crown Copyright (c) 2005 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.