The intensity transverse profile of the light produced in the process of stimulated down-conversion is derived. A quantum-mechanical treatment is used. We show that the angular spectrum of the pump laser can be transferred to the stimulated down-converted beam, so that images can also be transferred from the pump to the down-converted beam. We also show that the transfer can occur from the stimulating beam to the down-converted one. Finally, we study the process of diffraction through an arbitrarily shaped screen. For the special case of a double-slit, the interference pattern is explicitly obtained. The visibility for the spontaneous emitted light is in accordance with the van Cittert - Zernike theorem for incoherent light, while the visibility for the stimulated emitted light is unity. The overall visibility is in accordance with previous experimental results.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0010025,
title = {Image and Coherence Transfer in the Stimulated Down-conversion Process},
author = {P. H. Souto Ribeiro and S. Padua and C. H. Monken},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0010025},
year = {2009}
}