  The problem of having to reconstruct the decay rates and corresponding
amplitudes of the single-exponential components of a noisy multi-exponential
signal is common in many other areas of physics and engineering besides lattice
field theory, and it can be helpful to study the methods devised and used for
that purpose in those contexts in order to get a better handle on the problem
of extracting masses and matrix elements from lattice correlators. Here we
consider the use of Pad\'e and Pad\'e-Laplace methods, which have found wide
use in laser fluorescence spectroscopy and beyond, emphasizing the importance
of using robust Pad\'e approximants to avoid spurious poles. To facilitate the
accurate evaluation of the Laplace transform required for the Pad\'e-Laplace
method, we also present a novel approach to the numerical quadrature of
multi-exponential functions.
