Effects of beam polarization on coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering using noisy light

The effects of different linear polarization schemes on the noisy light-based coherent anti-Stokes Raman scattering [I-(2) CARS] signal were investigated. It was found that certain polarization schemes can selectively shut down the contributions from terms represented by various factorized time correlation (FTC) diagrams to the I-(2) CARS spectrogram. FTC diagram analysis was used in conjunction with the symmetry properties of the hyperpolarizability to provide a theoretical understanding of this phenomenon and serve as the basis for simulation of the I-(2) CARS spectrogram. Striking agreement is seen between the simulations and the experimental results for benzene and several methylated benzene derivatives. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.