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APL Photonics

40 Gb/s quantum random number generation based on optically sampled amplified spontaneous emission

Ya Guo, Qiang Cai, Pu Li, Zhiwei Jia, Bingjie Xu, Qianwu Zhang, Yamei Zhang, Ruonan Zhang, Zhensen Gao, K.A. Shore, Yuncai Wang

Published Jun 1, 2021• 36 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We present a photonic approach for fast quantum random number generation based on optically sampled amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). This approach utilizes a terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer to sample the ASE and then digitize the sampled optical pulses into random bits using a multi-bit parallel comparator. A proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates that 40 Gb/s random bits with verified randomness can be obtained using our method. The current generation rate is mainly limited by the bandwidth of the available ASE source.

DOI
10.1063/5.0040250

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We present a photonic approach for fast quantum random number generation based on optically sampled amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). This approach utilizes a terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer to sample the ASE and then digitize the sampled optical pulses into random bits using a multi-bit parallel comparator. A proof-of-concept experiment demonstrates that 40 Gb/s random bits with verified randomness can be obtained using our method. The current generation rate is mainly limited by the bandwidth of the available ASE source.
Quantum random number generators (QRNG) based on amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) are known to achieve multi-gigabit-per-second rates through high-speed sampling of intensity and phase fluctuations. Two popular implementations of these QRNGs are based on balanced detection of ASEASE and ASE-Laser beating. The high QRNG rates reported so far however come at the price of increased system complexity, making it a clear deterrent for widespread use. In this paper, we perform a direct one-to-one comparison study between ASEASE and ASE-Laser-based QRNGs using detailed theoretical modeling and supporting experiments, with the goal of achieving 1 Gbps QRNG using simple, low-bandwidth photodetectors and low sampling rate digitizers. We develop, for the first time to the best of out knowledge, closed-form analytical expressions to describe the signal variance as a function of realistic, nonideal fiber-optic optical components, the signal correlations as a function of digitizer sampling rate, and minimum entropy as a function of signal variance. We observe a trade-off between the correlations in the detected signals and the sampling rate used, thereby obtaining an optimum sampling rate and hence the digitizer specification for extracting the best randomness. We also observe the standard deviation in the signal distribution is higher for ASE-Laser QRNG in comparison to the ASE-ASE implementation. Using off-the-shelf telecom fiber components, balanced detectors with bandwidth as low as 100 MHz, and an 8-bit digitizer operating at a sampling rate of 100 Megasamplesper-second (MSPS), we achieve QRNG rates of 546.03 Mbps and 507.94 Mbps for the ASE-ASE and ASE-Laser beating implementations respectively. The ASE-ASE QRNG rates are subsequently doubled to more than 1 Gbps using polarization multiplexing and bit-interleaving.
We propose a real-time self-balanced photonic method for extracting ultrafast random numbers from broadband randomness sources. In place of electronic analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), the balanced photo-detection technology is used to directly quantize optically sampled chaotic pulses into a continuous random number stream. Benefitting from ultrafast photo-detection, our method can efficiently eliminate the generation rate bottleneck from electronic ADCs which are required in nearly all the available fast physical random number generators. A proof-of-principle experiment demonstrates that using our approach 10 Gb/s real-time and statistically unbiased random numbers are successfully extracted from a bandwidth-enhanced chaotic source. The generation rate achieved experimentally here is being limited by the bandwidth of the chaotic source. The method described has the potential to attain a real-time rate of 100 Gb/s.
We present a real-time scheme for ultrafast random number (RN) extraction from a broadband photonic entropy source. Ultralow jitter mode-locked pulses are used to sample the stochastic intensity fluctuations of the entropy source in the optical domain. A discrete self-delay comparison technology is exploited to quantize the sampled pulses into continuous RN streams directly. This scheme is bias free, eliminates the electronic jitter bottleneck confronted by currently available physical RN generators, and has no need for threshold tuning and post-processing. To demonstrate its feasibility, we perform a proof-of-principle experiment using an optically injected chaotic laser diode. RN streams at up to 7 Gb/s with verified randomness were thereby successfully extracted in real time. With the provision of a photonic entropy source with sufficient bandwidth, the present approach is expected to provide RN generation rates of several tens of gigabits per second.
We report two Quantum Random Number Generator (QRNG) schemes based on Amplified Spontaneous Emission (ASE) to address the problems of previous ASE based QRNGs – (1) costlier and commercially difficult-to-get components, (2) higher electrical noise in the faster detectors. Our ASE-ASE-beating based QRNG, built using commercially available components, clocks in 7.437Gbps random number generation rate. Our second QRNG scheme based on the beating of LASER and ASE of similar power generates random bits at a speed of 7.80Gbps. The minimum entropy values for these schemes are 5.21 and 5.4990 respectively for an 8-bit ADC. The second scheme reports higher entropy because its random numbers has a higher variance than first one. We use the Toeplitz extractor on the raw bits to generate unbiased random numbers and verify them with the help of industry-standard statistical tests.
We report the sampling rate dependency of a single-bit quantum random number generation scheme using a filtered and amplified source of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE). The quality of randomness is measured by the number of passed NIST statistical randomness tests. The number decreases for almost all cases when increasing the sampling rate. We apply a simple self-delay XOR post-processing technique, drastically improving the quality for low sampling rates. However, sampling rates higher than the analog bandwidth of the sampled intensity fluctuations are found to be ineligible for the generation scheme.
True randomness is critical to secure communication in both quantum and classical regimes. We propose an approach of true random number generation based on the intrinsic randomness of spontaneous emission. In this approach, a method of random bit extraction was employed to extract true random bits simultaneously as the measurement of the physical entropy source. The random bits generated by the true random number generators have been statistically verified to be bias-free and mutually independent. With the current experimental setup, 7 random bits can be generated in parallel at a rate up to 40 GHz.