Controlling the quantum noise of intense light

In reality, a wide variety of laser sources have fluctuations in excess (and often far in excess) of the coherent state, even when technical noise sources are suppressed. I present recent advances that challenge this paradigm, and show how multimode nonlinearities can be steered towards reducing the noise of intense beams of light down to quantum limits associated with coherent states and squeezed states of light. I will show how multimode correlations and wavefront shaping can suppress excess noise by orders of magnitude: reaching, and even surpassing, the shot-noise limit. We demonstrate these effects for femtosecond pulses propagating in both single-mode fibers and in multi-mode fibers. Our ability to control noise is aided by a general theory framework that we have developed, called quantum sensitivity analysis, which lets us predict how quantum noise is transformed by nonlinear and multimode systems.