Evolution of spatio-spectral coherence properties of twin beam states in the high-gain regime

We present the experimental investigation of the coherence properties of the light produced by parametric down conversion in the macroscopic regime, also including pump depletion. In particular, we compare the results obtained in very similar geometric conditions by using two nonlinear crystals having different lengths. We observe that the number of generated photons, the size of spatio-spectral coherence areas, and the number of modes in the photon number statistics exhibit a similar behavior in the two crystals as a function of pump mean power, even if we notice that the absolute values are different. The available theory of parametric down conversion cannot account for these differences.