Effective suppression of stray light in rotational coherent anti-stokes Raman spectroscopy using an angle-tuned short-wave-pass filter.

Stray light interference is a common problem in spontaneous rotational Raman spectroscopy and rotational coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectropscopy (CARS). The reason is that the detected spectrum appears in the spectral vicinity of the probe beam wavelength, and stray light at this wavelength from optics and surfaces is hard to suppress. In this Note, efficient suppression of stray light is demonstrated for rotational CARS measurements using a commercially available short-wave-pass filter. By angle-tuning this filter with a specified cut-off wavelength at 561 nm, the cut-off wavelength could be tuned to a desired spectral position so that more than 80% transmission is achieved as close as 15 cm(-1) (approximately 0.4 nm) from the probe beam wavelength of 532.0 nm, while the intensity at this wavelength is suppressed by two orders of magnitude.