{"id":556,"date":"2008-08-06T00:08:21","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T05:08:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=556"},"modified":"2008-08-06T00:08:24","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T05:08:24","slug":"creating-random-numbers-the-quantum-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=556","title":{"rendered":"Creating random numbers the quantum way"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"qrng.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The stream of high quality papers continues from the lab of Andrew Shields at Toshiba Research in Cambridge, UK. Today, his team unveils a new type of quantum random number generator and a fine looking machine it appears to be.<\/p>\n

Here’s the idea. Create a stream of single photons are emitted at random intervals that depend entirely on quantum processes–an attenuated continuous wave laser should do the trick. Fire them at a gated photon detector which accurately records their (entirely random) arrival time. The arrival time within a gated time period is then a random number ready for use in quantum cryptography or whatever app you happen to need it for.<\/p>\n

The team uses the souped up photodiode that we saw a couple of weeks back<\/a> to make the photon detections at rates of 4MB\/s. And Shields says 100MB\/s is possible–that’s two orders of magnitude faster than existing quantum random number generators.<\/p>\n

What’s more, the new device is much simpler than other quantum random generators. One popular approach is to send a photon through a beam splitter and see which way it goes. In principle, the outcome is perfectly random but in practice it ain’t because it’s almost impossible to make a beam splitter with perfect 50% probability split.<\/p>\n

In practice, the data from these devices needs a certain amount of massaging which can be costly and time-consuming.<\/p>\n

So Shields looks to be on a roll.\u00a0 Exciting times in his lab.<\/p>\n

Ref: arxiv.org\/abs\/0807.4111<\/a>: A High Speed, Post-Processing Free, Quantum Random Number Generator<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The stream of high quality papers continues from the lab of Andrew Shields at Toshiba Research in Cambridge, UK. Today, his team unveils a new type of quantum random number generator and a fine looking machine it appears to be. Here’s the idea. Create a stream of single photons are emitted at random intervals that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mean-machines","category-weird-n-spooky"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}