All-optical processing in coherent nonlinear spectroscopy

In spectroscopy, the fingerprint of a substance is usually comprised of a sequence of spectral lines with characteristic frequencies and strengths. Identification of substances often involves postprocessing, where the measured spectrum is compared with tabulated fingerprint spectra. Here we suggest a scheme for nonlinear spectroscopy, where, through coherent control of the nonlinear process, the information from the entire spectrum can be practically collected into a single coherent entity. We apply this for all-optical analysis of coherent Raman spectra and demonstrate enhanced detection and effective background suppression using coherent processing.