Experimental investigation of the intensity fluctuation joint probability and conditional distributions of the twin-beam quantum state

We give the intensity fluctuation joint probability of the twin-beam quantum state, which was generated with an optical parametric oscillator operating above threshold. Then we present what to our knowledge is the first measurement of the intensity fluctuation conditional probability distributions of twin beams. The measured inference variance of twin beams 0.62+/-0.02, which is less than the standard quantum limit of unity, indicates inference with a precision better than that of separable states. The measured photocurrent variance exhibits a quantum correlation of as much as -4.9+/-0.2 dB between the signal and the idler. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America.