Understanding High-Gain Twin-Beam Sources Using Cascaded Stimulated Emission

We present a new method for the spectral characterization of pulsed twin-beam sources in the high-gain regime, using cascaded stimulated emission. We show an implementation of this method for a periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate spontaneous parametric down-conversion source generating up to 60 photon pairs per pulse, and we demonstrate excellent agreement between our experiments and our theory. This work enables the complete and accurate experimental characterization of high-gain effects in parametric down-conversion, including self- and cross-phase modulation. Moreover, our theory allows the exploration of designs with the goal of improving the specifications of twin-beam sources for application in quantum information, computation, sampling, and metrology.