Cascaded second-order contribution to the third-order nonlinear susceptibility

Cascading of second-order nonlinear effects leads to an effective third-order nonlinearity. In addition to the macroscopic electric field at the intermediate frequencies another term has to be taken into account which is due to the locality of the intermediate polarization sources. Combining the correction terms at the three intermediate frequencies gives rise to a third-order susceptibility tensor, which exhibits the same symmetry properties as an intrinsic susceptibility. This particularly applies to the contributions from the rectified and the second-harmonic fields to the degenerate susceptibility.