Coherence area measurements of bright entangled twin beams

Quantum states of light with multiple spatial modes are fundamental for quantum imaging and parallel quantum information processing. Thus, their characterization, which can be achieved through measurements of the coherence area, is an important area of research. We present a comparative study between different measurement techniques for the coherence area of bright entangled twin beams of light. The first one is a direct measurement based on correlation measurements between spatial intensity fluctuations of the twin beams while the second one is based on a noise analysis of different spatial regions in the temporal domain. We generate the bright entangled twin beams with a four-wave mixing process in a hot rubidium vapor cell and capture images of the twin beams with an electron-multiplying charge-coupled-device camera. We show that the time domain measurements, which provides a significantly less complicated measurement scheme, provides an estimate of the size of the coherence area of the same order of magnitude as the direct measurement done in the spatial domain.