ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one of the most important classes of anisotropic media, and shows that they are lossless dielectrics. It examines only those fundamental notions about anisotropic media that may be considered essential ingredients, in the education of an advanced engineer who intends to work in the area of information technology. The fundamentals of nonlinear optics, as well as their links with propagation in anisotropic media, are well covered. The most widely used assumption is to deal only with plane waves of a given polarization. Another consequence is that it appears convenient to classify anisotropic media into classes, which differ from each other in the manner of simplifying the equations that the fields must obey. The chapter discusses how to calculate the main features of plane waves which travel in the media.
