The visibility and quality of optical images is ultimately limited not by diffraction but by the quantum noise affecting each pixel of a detector. Multimode non-classical states of light, characterized by spatial quantum correlation or local reduced quantum noise, permit in principle to go beyond the standard quantum limit and therefore to improve transverse optical resolution. It has been predicted that Optical Parametric Oscillators (OPO) operating simultaneously on many transverse modes are good candidates for generating multimode non-classical states of light. We perform an experiment showing that a c.w. confocal OPO above threshold emits such states. Below threshold, the OPO is turned to a multimode optical parametric amplifier.
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