We present the development of optical sources at 532 nm wavelength in continuous-wave and pulsed mode with two different configurations using nonlinear crystals.

The first part of the work involves building a high peak power, passive mode-locked laser based on the principle of nonlinear polarization evolution. The laser was designed to have part fiber and part free-space optical elements. The free space segment is comprised of waveplates, and a polarizing beam splitter, which when used together with the fiber elements acted as an artificial saturable absorber thus initiating the mode-locking mechanism. The passive method used here allowed us to choose the operating regime of the laser by simply rotating the waveplates. The laser regimes observed were continuous-wave(CW), q-switched mode-locking(QML), and mode-locking regime(ML).This laser was then used in the pulsed mode as a source to perform frequency-doubling in a single-pass configuration.

The second part of the work uses a continuous-wave laser to perform frequency doubling with a bow-tie configuration-based optical cavity. A semi-monolithic cavity was built to ease the alignment of the mirrors and make the design compact. Finally, the design was stabilized using the Pound-Drever-Hall locking method.