Pulse-to-pulse noise reduction in infrared supercontinuum spectroscopy: polarization and amplitude fluctuations

Infrared supercontinuum sources suffer from amplitude and polarization fluctuations. These fluctuations are seeded by stochastic noise, and thus limits the applicability of such sources. Here it is shown that implementation of polarization insensitive pulse-to-pulse normalization enhances the signal-to-noise ratio up to 18 times compared to conventional 45 degrees beam splitting. This serves as a promising approach to achieve highly sensitive supercontinuum spectroscopy.