Suppression of Supercontinuum Generation with Circularly Polarized Light

Abstract

Controlling a nonlinear process like supercontinuum generation (SG) with the polarization-state of laser is an important demonstration of laser selectivity. We show that the threshold for SG and the total amount of supercontinuum generated depends on incident laser polarization for isotropic samples. Irrespective of the nature of the samples chosen, SG efficiency decreases as the incident laser polarization changes from linear to circular and thus, provides the first experimental demonstration of the suppression of SG with circularly polarized light. The ratio of the overall SG between the linear and circular polarization (i.e., measure of suppression) undergoes an intensity dependent decrease from large initial values to asymptotic limits, irrespective of samples.