6. Application examples

The aim of this section is to briefly present a few examples of applications for optical parametric sources, in order to illustrate their potential. Many of these applications are in the infrared, the spectral range of choice for optical parametric sources. Indeed, this part of the electromagnetic spectrum is characterized by two essential properties: firstly, it contains several transmission windows from the atmosphere [E 4 030] , and secondly, it corresponds to the so-called "molecular fingerprint" region, where many molecules exhibit strong, well-differentiated absorption lines...