Certifying Unpredictable Randomness from Quantum Nonlocality

Dominick J. Joch, Sergei Slussarenko, Yuanlong Wang +6 more

The authors use polarization-entangled photon pairs to generate random numbers from quantum nonlocality. The unpredictability of the generated randomness is certified via quantum steering with the detection loophole closed.

Stefano Pironio

Carl A. Miller, Yaoyun Shi

Quantum nonlocality is an inherently non-classical feature of quantum mechanics and manifests itself through violation of Bell inequalities for nonlocal games. We show that in a fairly general setting, a simple extension of a nonlocal game can certify instead the absence of quantum nonlocality. Through contraposition, our result implies that a super-classical performance for such a game ensures that a player's output is unpredictable to the other player. Previously such output unpredictability was known with respect to a third party.

Art Hobson

Peter Bierhorst, Emanuel H. Knill, Scott Glancy +7 more

Random numbers are an important resource for applications such as numerical simulation and secure communication. However, it is difficult to certify whether a physical random number generator is truly unpredictable. Here, we exploit the phenomenon of quantum nonlocality in a loophole-free photonic Bell test experiment for the generation of randomness that cannot be predicted within any physical theory that allows one to make independent measurement choices and prohibits superluminal signaling. To certify and quantify the randomness, we describe a new protocol that performs well in an experimental regime characterized by low violation of Bell inequalities. Applying an extractor function to our data, we obtained 256 new random bits, uniform to within 0.001.