RP-CARS takes advantage  of the polarization-dependent selection rules to detect the local microscopic orientation of the chemical bonds under investigation. By means of RP-CARS it is possible to visualize the
degree of orientation anisotropy of selected molecular bonds and to detect their average orientation direction.
It is possible by continuously rotating the orientation of the polarization plane of the incident light with a rotating waveplate and then, sequentially, for each image pixel, analysing the orientation dependence of the CARS signal intensity. This allows measuring for each pixel the average-orientation plane of the molecular bonds of interest and the degree of this spatial anisotropy in the point-spread-function volume.