Impulsive stimulated Raman scattering: comparison between phase-sensitive and spectrally filtered techniques.

Impulsive stimulated Raman scattering is used to generate and control coherent phonons and other low-frequency modes. In transparent materials, pump-probe experiments are usually performed by spectrally resolving the probe beam and measuring the spectral shift as a function of pump-probe time delay. By measuring the optical phase of the probe pulse as a function of time delay, we find that the phonon signal can be increased by a factor alpha(omegadelta)(-1), where omega is the phonon frequency and delta is the pulse duration.