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Physical Review A

Certifying quantum randomness with disturbance

Liang-Liang Sun, Xingjian Zhang, Xiang Zhou, Zheng-Da Li, Xiongfeng Ma, Jingyun Fan, Sixia Yu

Published Apr 17, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A quantum measurement generates genuine quantum randomness if and only if it breaks coherence and disturbs the measured state (and a following incompatible measurement). Here, we establish a quantitative relation between the generated randomness and its disturbance effect and provide a source-independent randomness verification protocol. Our protocol employs a few assumptions: (I) independence between the source and the measurement devices and (II) the L\"uders' rule for measurement devices. Without involving heavy mathematical machinery, the generated quantum randomness can be directly estimated with the disturbance effect. In addition to the previously mentioned basic assumptions about measurements, we can improve our estimation by integrating additional measurement information for further optimization. Our protocol shows a high efficiency and yields a higher randomness generation rate than the existing one based on the uncertainty relation [G. Vallone et al., Phys. Rev. A 90, 052327 (2014)].

DOI
10.1103/physreva.111.042210

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Measuring quantum states provides means to generate genuine random numbers. It has been shown that genuine randomness can be obtained even with an uncharacterized quantum source. In this work, we propose a framework that formalizes the idea of realizing source-independent quantum random number generation via measuring coherence. Without full state tomography, the coherence of the source can be estimated by coherence witnesses. The existing uncertainty-relation-based schemes can be treated as special cases under the coherence framework, as we design a nonlinear coherence witness that can essentially yield the same results. Meanwhile, we propose a source-independent random number generation scheme, which can achieve a higher randomness generation rate than the uncertainty-relation-based ones.
We present a scheme for semi-device-independent quantum randomness certification from an untrusted measurement device and a trusted source and demonstrate it experimentally. No assumptions about noise or imperfections in the measurement are required and the scheme is simple to implement with existing technology. The measurement device is probed with a few trusted states and the output entropy can be lower bounded conditioned on the observed outcome distribution. The protocol can be applied to measurements with any finite number of outcomes and in particular can be realised by homodyne measurements of the vacuum using a detector probed by coherent states, as we experimentally demonstrate by intensity modulation of a telecom-wavelength pilot laser followed by homodyne detection and discretisation by analog-to-digital conversion. We show that randomness can be certified in the presence of both Gaussian additive noise and non-Gaussian imperfections.
How to generate genuine quantum randomness from untrusted devices is an important problem in quantum information processing. Inspired by previous work on a self-testing quantum random number generator [T. Lunghi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 150501 (2015)], we present a method to generate quantum randomness from a prepare-and-measure scenario with independent devices. In existing protocols, the quantum randomness depends only on a witness value (e.g., Clauser-Horne-Shimony-Holt value), which is calculated with the observed probabilities. Differently, here all the observed probabilities are directly used to calculate the min-entropy in our method. Through numerical simulation, we find that the min-entropy of our proposed scheme is higher than that in the previous work when a typical untrusted Bennett-Brassard 1984 (BB84) setup is used. Consequently, thanks to the proposed method, more genuine quantum random numbers may be obtained than before.
Standard quantum verification and certification protocols often assume that experimental sources emit independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) states. In realistic scenarios, however, temporal drift, memory effects, feedback, and correlated noise can violate this assumption, causing standard analyses to underestimate uncertainty and overestimate device performance. Here, we introduce a general framework for quantum verification and certification in which the state produced in each round may depend arbitrarily on the preceding experimental history. Our method provides rigorous confidence intervals for observable expectation values averaged over the experimental trajectory. The framework covers both full verification, in which every state is measured, and spot-checking certification, in which a randomly selected subset is tested to certify the average observable value of the complementary, remaining systems. We apply the framework to importance-sampled Pauli measurements for direct fidelity estimation, energy estimation, and entanglement witnessing, and to classical shadows, allowing multiple observables to be certified simultaneously from the same test data. We illustrate the framework numerically and demonstrate it experimentally through Bell-state certification on a quantum processor.