Changing the color of laser light on the femtosecond time scale
Thursday, June 15, 2017 - 05:22
in Physics & Chemistry
How can the color of laser light be changed? One popular method to achieve this is the so-called second harmonic generation (SHG) effect, which doubles the frequency of light and hence changes its color. However, observing this nonlinear effect requires a polar crystal in which inversion symmetry is broken. For this reason, identifying crystals that can elicit strong SHG is an important research topic with applications in materials science.