Recent progress in yellow laser: Principles, status and perspectives

•Different nonlinear lasers and different resonator structures for yellow laser.•Stimulated Raman scattering laser for obtaining yellow light output.•Output characteristics including nonlinear frequency conversion, conversion efficiency and output power for yellow laser. Yellow lasers have always attracted much attention in the fields of biomedicine, lidar, adaptive optics and nano-guide stars. Different application scenarios also have differences in the selection of yellow light wavelengths and various indicators. For example, the Coarse Star and Nano-guide technologies require a narrow yellow light linewidth of 589 nm. According to the generation method, it can be divided into dye excitation, semiconductor excitation and nonlinear frequency conversion excitation. Non-linear frequency conversion technology can be divided into sum frequency generation (SFG), second harmonic generation (SHG), optical parametric oscillation (OPO) and stimulated Raman scattering (SRS). Among them, SRS has become a current research hotspot due to its high beam quality, high wavelength scalability and high conversion efficiency. The development and research status of non-linear frequency conversion technology are expatiated in this article, which is useful reference for the future in this field.