Surface-sensitive polarized Raman spectroscopy of biological tissue

In a two-layer diffusing medium, polarized light directly backscattering off the superficial layer will partially retain its sense of polarization, whereas deeper-probing light will be increasingly depolarized by diffusion. This effect has been studied in both elastic scattering and fluorescence contexts. We apply this method to Raman scattering in two two-layer models with a highly diffusing lower layer of glucose powder and an upper layer of either clear plastic or chicken skin. We employ detection of orthogonal polarization states to generate a Raman spectrum of only the superficial layer by combining the orthogonal signals. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.