Compared with Bessel beams, frozen waves maintain nondiffracting propagation while allowing customizable longitudinal intensity profiles, particularly enabling controllable orbital angular momentum variation along the propagation direction. Such characteristics provide a powerful toolkit for diverse applications. However, most existing studies remain within the realm of linear optics, and it is still unclear whether the structural features of frozen waves can be preserved during nonlinear parametric processes. Here, by imagining a frozen wave carried by one fundamental beam onto the nonlinear crystal, we equivalently mimic a nonlinear frozen-wave phase plate that enables coherent transfer of a twisted frozen wave from one beam to another. When another fundamental beam is incident on the crystal, the sum-frequency signal generated through the nonlinear parametric process inherits the frozen-wave structure. More importantly, by leveraging nonlinear vortex filtering, we further experimentally demonstrate the coherent-transfer property. Our scheme can be extended to other nonlinear optical processes, enriching the frozen-wave control toolkit and holding promise for optical micromanipulation and large alphabet optical communications.

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• Angular momentum of light
• Nonlinear optics
• Structured light