Eg. Fundamental is 5 MHz & you get harmonics at 10 MHz, 20MHz, etc.
How is the diode’s non-linearity causing this? I can’t find a way to visualize it.
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You may try to visualize a square wave at 5MHz. The issue with square waves is that they are not actually a single signal but it is a sum of a number of different sine waves at different frequencies, amplitudes and phase. The first is pretty obvious, it is the 5MHz sine wave which forms the majority of the square wave. But then you end up with lobes in the corners that is not covered by this sine wave. If you try to find a sine wave that covers these loabs you end up with a 15MHz wave. But again it does not fit perfectly so you need a 25MHz wave to cover the remaining parts. And then a 35MHz wave, etc. In fact a square wave is a special case here as it only have odd harmonics.
Diodes do not exactly create a square wave from a sine wave. But because of their non-linearity they do make the wave more square. They cut off the tops and bottoms of the waves and squashes them a bit. And what this means in practice is that there are harmonics added to the signal. Odd harmonics is created by the symmetric distortion and even harmonics by the asymmetric distortion.
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