Control of the size of the coherence area in entangled twin beams

We study the effect of a change in size and spatial profile of the pump beam in an atomic-based four-wave mixing process on the size of the coherence area of the generated entangled twin beams. We perform experiments and develop a theoretical model to obtain a measure of the linear extent or ``radius'' of the coherence area from noise measurements of the twin beams as a function of transmission through a variable size slit. Our results show that an increase in the size of the pump reduces the size of the coherence area. More interestingly, we find that the use of a flat-top pump beam of the same size as a Gaussian pump beam leads to a reduction by a factor of more than 2 in the linear extent of the coherence area. This in turn leads to an increase by a factor of more than 4 in the number of spatial modes that make up the twin beams and a resolution enhancement of the entangled images that can be generated with the four-wave mixing process.