ABSTRACT
One of the desirable effects of interaction of nonlinear material with highly intense laser beams is nonlinear frequency conversion, which employs the lowest order nonlinearity of the nonlinear medium. Such frequency conversion not only allows extension of wavelengths of fixed frequency lasers by harmonic generation processes but also has the capability to offer broadly tunable coherent radiations at almost any desirable wavelength of the electromagnetic spectrum through the processes that includes sum frequency mixing, difference frequency mixing of different coherent sources as well as through optical parametric oscillations. Apart from discussion of basic concepts of such nonlinear frequency conversion processes, the chapter also explores some novel methods of enhancing their conversion efficiencies.
