Cascaded highly nondegenerate four-wave-mixing phenomenon in transparent isotropic condensed media

Broad-bandwidth light pulses with different frequencies, extending from the IR to the UV, are simultaneously generated when two noncollinear, ultrafas t laser pulses from a visible dual-frequency laser propagate through bulb i sotropic transparent media such as common glass. This phenomenon, which is believed to have been previously unreported, can be explained by a cascade of highly nondegenerate four-wave-mixing processes and corresponds to a coh erent scattering effect with geometrically minimized phase mismatch. Freque ncy-upconverted beams were observed up to the 11th order. (C) 2000 Optical Society of America.