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Updated: Jul 29, 2025

Quantum State Engineering of Light with Continuous-wave Optical Parametric Oscillators
Published on: May 30, 2014
Development of a High Min-Entropy Quantum Random Number Generator Based on Amplified Spontaneous Emission
Charlotte K Duda1, Kristina A Meier2, Raymond T Newell1
1Material Physics & Applications, Los Alamos National Lab, P.O. Box 1663, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA.
Abstract:
We present the theory, architecture, and performance characteristics of a quantum random number generator (QRNG) which operates in a PCI express form factor-compatible plug-and-play design. The QRNG relies on a thermal light source (in this case, amplified spontaneous emission), which exhibits photon bunching according to the Bose-Einstein (BE) statistics. We demonstrate that 98.7% of the unprocessed random bit stream min-entropy is traceable to the BE (quantum) signal. The classical component is then removed using a non-reuse shift-XOR protocol, and the final random numbers are generated at a 200 Mbps rate and shown to pass the statistical randomness test suites FIPS 140-2, Alphabit, SmallCrush, DIEHARD, and Rabbit of the TestU01 library.
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