Depolarization properties of the femtosecond supercontinuum generated in condensed media

In this paper, we present a study of depolarization of a supercontinuum across its spectral range as a function of the femtosecond laser pump intensity for an anisotropic crystalline condensed medium, potassium-dihydrogen-phosphate (KDP) crystal, and compare our results with commonly used supercontinuum generation (SCG) materials, namely borosilicate glass Schott (BK-7) glass (representing isotropic amorphous condensed media) and BaF2 (isotropic crystalline condensed media). Our results show that at higher input powers, depolarization in the continuum increases for BK-7, BaF2, and along the direction of the optic axis of the KDP crystal. However, in the case of KDP crystal, we observe that the depolarization properties are strongly dependent on (i) the plane of polarization of incident light and (ii) the orientation of the crystal with respect to the incident light. Our studies also confirm that one can achieve SCG in a KDP crystal that maintains the same state of input polarization even at high input intensities when proper orientation of the crystal is used.