Nonlinear optics (NLO) investigates how intense light, most commonly produced by lasers, interacts with materials in ways that modify the light’s properties, such as its frequency, phase, or amplitude. Under strong optical fields, the response of the material becomes nonlinear, enabling phenomena like frequency conversion, harmonic generation, parametric processes, thermal lensing which are fundamental to modern photonics and quantum optical technologies.
The figure provided below conceptually illustrates how an applied optical field induces a nonlinear response in an atom, producing new frequency components through higher-order nonlinear processes.