Stimulated rotational Raman scattering in H/sub 2/ in the presence of Stokes seeding

Summary form only given. One expects the gain in stimulated rotational Raman scattering (SRRS) to be strongly influenced by the ellipticity of the polarization of the pump radiation. Indeed, the first observation of SRRS involved a circularly polarized pump beam, with a linearly polarized pump producing no observable rotational scattering. Subsequent work elucidated the dependence of the intensity of the scattered radiation on the polarization of a pump beam of arbitrary ellipticity. In all of these experiments, the frequency-shifted beams originate from a stochastic process. The random nature of the initiation process manifests itself in large intrinsic uncertainties associated with the data. The size of these uncertainties cannot be reduced by increasing the number of experimental realizations ("laser shots") per data point; rather, they can be significantly reduced only by seeding the cell with a Stokes beam of known intensity and polarization.