Experimental Implementation of Bias-free Quantum Random Number
Generator based on Vacuum Fluctuation
Ziyong Zheng
1
, Yichen Zhang
1
, Song Yu
1
and Hong Guo
2
1
State Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications,
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing, 100876, China
2
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Optical Communication Systems and Networks,
School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, and Center for Quantum Information Technology,
Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China
Keywords:
Bias-free, Phase Modulation, Quantum Random Number Generation, Vacuum Fluctuation.
Abstract:
We experimentally demonstrate a bias-free optical quantum random number generator with real-time random-
ness extraction to directly output uniform distributed random numbers by measuring the vacuum fluctuation
of quantum state. A phase modulator is utilized in the scheme to effectively reduce the influence of deviations
between two arms of the generator caused by the imperfect practical devices, which is an innovative solution
in the field of quantum random number generator. In the case where the feedback modulation frequency is
much faster than the phase jitter, an unbiased result can be obtained by an additional subtraction between the
compensation signal and its average value to eliminate residual deviation. A following randomness extractor is
applied to eliminate the influence of residual side information introduced by the imperfect devices in practical
system.
1 INTRODUCTION
Random numbers are widely used in simulation (Fer-
renberg et al., 1992), lottery, cryptography (Gennaro,
2006) and other applications. The randomness of ran-
dom numbers has a significant impact on the perfor-
mance of the whole system. Especially in cryptogra-
phy applications, random numbers with poor random-
ness will directly reduce the security of the cryptog-
raphy system (Bouda et al., 2012). The rapid devel-
opment of quantum cryptography technologies such
as quantum key distribution (Weedbrook et al., 2012;
Scarani et al., 2009; Diamanti et al., 2016; Zhang
et al., 2017; Gisin et al., 2002) which require se-
cure random number generation, unarguably acceler-
ate the researches about true random number gener-
ation. Quantum random number generator (QRNG)
exploits intrinsic probabilistic quantum processes to
directly generate true random numbers, which is re-
garded as a promising technology (Ma et al., 2016;
Bera et al., 2017; Herrero-Collantes and Garcia-
Escartin, 2017; Jennewein et al., 2000). Therefore,
many related works have been put forward in recent
years. These schemes use quantum sources includes
photon path (Jennewein et al., 2000; Stefanov et al.,
2000), photon arrival time (Wayne et al., 2009; Nie
et al., 2014; Dynes et al., 2008; Wahl et al., 2011;
Ma et al., 2005), photon number distribution(Wei and
Guo, 2009; F
¨
urst et al., 2010; Applegate et al., 2015;
Ren et al., 2011), vacuum fluctuation (Gabriel et al.,
2010; Shen et al., 2010; Symul et al., 2011; Haw
et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2017; Raffaelli et al., 2018;
Xu et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2018b), phase noise (Qi
et al., 2010; Guo et al., 2010; Xu et al., 2012; Abell
´
an
et al., 2014; Nie et al., 2015; Yang et al., 2016; Zhang
et al., 2016; Liu et al., 2017) and amplified spon-
taneous emission noise of quantum states (Williams
et al., 2010; Li et al., 2011; Martin et al., 2015; Liu
et al., 2013; Wei et al., 2012), etc. Typically, proto-
cols based on the measurement of vacuum fluctuation
are more applied and valuable QRNG protocols, for
its convenience of state preparation, insensitivity of
detection efficiency and high generation speed.
The first QRNG based on vacuum fluctuation
is proposed in 2010 by measuring the quadrature
of the vacuum state, which can be expressed as
|
0
i
=
R
ψ(x)
|
x
i
dx in the quadrature representation,
where
|
x
i
is the amplitude quadrature eigenstates and
ψ(x) is the ground-state wavefunction, which is a
Gaussian function centered around x = 0 (Gabriel
et al., 2010).
Ideally, the electrical signal output from the de-
276
Zheng, Z., Zhang, Y., Yu, S. and Guo, H.
Experimental Implementation of Bias-free Quantum Random Number Generator based on Vacuum Fluctuation.
DOI: 10.5220/0007569902760282
In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology (PHOTOPTICS 2019), pages 276-282
ISBN: 978-989-758-364-3
Copyright
c
2019 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
tector should be evenly distributed near the 0 value.
While in practical system, the deviation of two signals
output from the homodyne detector caused by imper-
fect unbalanced devices, such as asymmetric beam
splitter or photodiodes (PDs) with different response
efficiency, will often cause the saturation of detector,
which is a great challenge for practical system. Gen-
erally, symmetrical devices will be chosen as sym-
metrical as possible so as to reduce the deviation of
the two arms. However, the practical devices can not
achieve complete symmetry. Minor deviation will be
amplified to a large voltage by the homodyne detec-
tor with a large gain, which will lead to saturation of
homodyne detector.
Protocol introduced in Ref. (Shen et al., 2010;
Symul et al., 2011; Haw et al., 2015) utilized fre-
quency shift and filtering technology to obtain the sig-
nal in the required frequency band and filter out the
signal outside the band, including low frequency sig-
nals that causes signal deviation. While it is based on
the premise of unsaturated signal. When the detec-
tor is saturated, in fact, this operation can not elimi-
nate the effect of saturation basically caused by front-
end parts. An intuitive solution is to introduce an ad-
justable attenuator at both output ends of the beam
splitter so as to adjust the balance of the two arms.
However, the mechanical jitter of the practical atten-
uator will inevitably lead to imbalance and be greatly
amplified by the amplifier in the detector, so that the
detector will still be saturated. Protocol introduced in
Ref. (Xu et al., 2017; Zheng et al., 2018b) proposed
an improved solution that is using AC coupling de-
tector to suppress the low-frequency components of
the signals detected by the PDs. In this way, the DC
components of the difference between the electrical
signals output from the two PDs will firstly be fil-
tered out and then the signals in the remaining band
will be amplified. To some extent, the feasibility of
this scheme depends on the perfect filtering of low
frequency components by transimpedance bandpass
amplifier. However, in practice, the imperfection of
the filter can not eliminate the influence of low fre-
quency signals perfectly, which causes the signal still
to be affected by residual low-frequency jitter. There-
fore, how to achieve an effective and feasible devia-
tion elimination method is a meaningful and practical
problem.
We experimentally demonstrate a bias-free opti-
cal quantum random number generator with real-time
randomness extraction to directly output uniform dis-
tributed random numbers by measuring the vacuum
fluctuation of quantum state. The generator utilizes
a phase modulator to effectively reduce the deviation
between two arms of the generator caused by the im-
perfect practical devices. Unbiased results can be ob-
tained by subtracting the mean value from the com-
pensated signal in every modulation period since the
feedback modulating frequency is far faster than the
phase jitter. Thus our generator can output bias-free
and real-time random numbers stably at a speed of
640 Mbps by applying a real-time randomness extrac-
tor to eliminate the influence of classical noise.
2 DEVIATION ELIMINATION
METHOD
The QRNG proposed in Ref. (Gabriel et al., 2010)
essentially exploits the quantum uncertainty of con-
tinuous observables, which is quadrature amplitude of
vacuum state to generate true random numbers. The
measurement of the quadrature amplitude collapses
the ground-state wave function, which is a Gaussian
function centered around x = 0, into quadrature eigen-
state. While the practical imperfect devices will make
the output of the two PDs different, so that there will
be a deviation after the subtraction of the two electri-
cal currents. To eliminate this deviation, a scheme
based on phase modulation is proposed with refer-
ence to laser interferometry technology. The block
diagram of the scheme is shown in Figure. 1.
The first beam splitter (BS
1
) with three ports di-
vides the light beam from the CW laser into the upper
and lower arms with a transmission coefficient of η
ab
1
and η
ab
2
. A phase modulator (PM) with insertion
loss of η
PM
is connected to the upper arm. The two
output signals are then connected to the input ports
of the second beam splitter (BS
2
). Four parameters
named η
c
1
d
1
, η
c
1
d
2
, η
c
2
d
1
, η
c
2
d
2
are used to represent
the transmission coefficients of port c
1
to d
1
, c
1
to d
2
,
c
2
to d
1
and c
2
to d
2
. The efficiency of the photo-
electric conversion of the two PDs is labeled η
pd
1
and
η
pd
2
respectively.
When the vacuum noise is not considered, from
a classical point of view, it is intuitive that there is
a phase difference ∆ϕ between the upper and lower
arms. The output photocurrent of PD
1
can be ex-
pressed as
i
pd
1
= |
p
η
pd
1
(η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
1
η
pm
E
in
e
j∆φ
+ η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
1
E
in
)|
2
= η
pd
1
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
1
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
1
)
+ 2η
pd
1
E
2
in
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
1
η
pm
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
1
cos(∆φ).
(1)
Similarly, the photocurrent output from PD2 can be
expressed as
Experimental Implementation of Bias-free Quantum Random Number Generator based on Vacuum Fluctuation
277
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Figure 1: Scheme of the bias-free QRNG based on vacuum fluctuation. The CW beams emitted by the laser diode is divided
into two beams by the first balanced beam splitter and one arm is modulated by a phase modulator to maintain the phase
difference between the two arms as a fixed value. The interference result of the second beam splitter would be a stable value.
The two input beams of the second beam splitter are treated as local oscillator (LO) separately and each LO will interfere with
the vacuum noise from the other input port of the beam splitter.
i
pd
2
= |
p
η
pd
2
(η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
2
η
pm
E
in
e
j∆φ
+ η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
2
E
in
)|
2
= η
pd
2
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
2
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
2
)
+ 2η
pd
2
E
2
in
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
2
η
pm
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
2
cos(∆φ).
(2)
So the actual current obtained by the homodyne
detector will be
i = i
pd
1
i
pd
2
=η
pd
1
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
1
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
1
)
η
pd
2
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
2
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
2
)
+ 2η
pm
E
2
in
cos(∆φ)(η
pd
1
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
1
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
1
η
pd
2
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
2
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
2
),
(3)
which indicates that i is closely related to the parame-
ters of the devices in the system. To obtain a bias-free
i, an intuitive solution is to make
η
pd
1
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
1
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
1
)
η
pd
2
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
2
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
2
) = 0
(4)
and
η
pd
1
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
1
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
1
η
pd
2
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
2
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
2
= 0
(5)
simultaneously, which is not an easy solution to per-
fectly achieve in practical systems. A feasible alter-
native is to control the phase difference ∆ϕ between
two paths satisfies
cos(∆φ) = [η
pd
1
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
1
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
1
)
η
pd
2
E
2
in
(η
2
ab
1
η
2
c
1
d
2
η
2
pm
+ η
2
ab
2
η
2
c
2
d
2
)]/
[2η
pm
E
2
in
(η
pd
1
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
1
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
1
η
pd
2
η
ab
1
η
c
1
d
2
η
ab
2
η
c
2
d
2
)].
(6)
In this way, the deviation can be effectively sup-
pressed, which can directly allow the increase of the
input local oscillation power. This will help to im-
prove the problem that the quantized bits of the fol-
lowing analog-to-digital converter (ADC) are wasted
caused by signals with limited amplitude.
Compared with the interference phenomenon be-
tween the classical strong light beams introduced
above, the interference between LO and vacuum state
will be different. The vacuum state is symmetrical
in the phase space, so the interference output of vac-
uum state and LO with different phases will remain
stable. In practice, the two input ports of the BS
2
are
connected to two light beams. Each light beams will
interfere with the other beam together with the vac-
uum fluctuation introduced by the other port. Sup-
pose the vacuum fluctuation obeys the Gaussian dis-
tribution N(0,σ
2
vac
), which means its mean value is
0 and its variance is σ
2
vac
. So the interference re-
sult of vacuum state from port c
2
and LO
1
from port
c
1
will follow Gaussian distribution N(µ
1
,σ
2
1
). Sim-
ilarly the result of vacuum state interference from
port c
1
and LO
2
from port c
2
will follow Gaussian
distribution N(µ
2
,σ
2
2
). So their difference will obey
N(µ
1
µ
2
,σ
2
1
+ σ
2
2
). As is known, the phase jitter of
the two arms is a slow process, so in a short time inter-
val τ, the deviation between the upper and lower arms
can be treated as a constant µ
1
µ
2
. Using this data,
we can balance the two arms through feedback con-
trolling the phase modulator. Its residual bias caused
by the limitation of the feedback control accuracy can
be eliminated by an additional subtraction operation.
The schematic diagram of feedback control is
shown in the Figure. 2. Usually, the phase difference
∆ϕ between the two arms changes at a speed slower
than KHz, which can be compensated to achieve a sta-
ble ∆ϕ when the compensation speed is much faster
PHOTOPTICS 2019 - 7th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology
278
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Figure 2: Algorithm of deviation elimination progress. We initialize the value of dac data, which represents the digital data
used to drive the DAC, to 8092. By comparing the sum of the samples collected in a time interval τ with the preset interval, the
phase difference between the two arms of the system will calculated and a feedback compensation operation will be performed
with a compensation frequency far greater than the phase jitter to make the fluctuation of the interference results be stabilized
in a very small interval. And c is the step of adjusting dac data.
than the speed of phase jitter. In each compensa-
tion period τ, we sum N data sampled during the
period and compare the sum value SUM with a de-
sired value. Considering the limited sampling accu-
racy of the practical ADC and the statistical fluctu-
ation caused by the limited data, we set a decision
interval [A, B] to replace the fixed value introduced
above. When SUM is in the interval [A,B], the devia-
tion of the output signal is within an acceptable range
and an unbiased result can be obtained by subtracting
their mean from the N data during τ.
While in the case that the deviation makes the
SUM value out of the interval [A,B], we will adjust
the feedback voltage according to the detection re-
sults. The output voltage from digital-to-analog con-
verter (DAC) convers 2V
π
which means 2 times of
the half wave voltage of the PM used in the system.
When SUM is less than A, we reduce the value of
dac data by c each time, which will result to the re-
duction of the compensation voltage loaded on PM.
When the value of dac data is less than c, we can di-
rectly change the value of dac data to 2
n
c due to
the two dac data value correspond to two close phase
modulation result. Conversely, when SUM is larger
than the upper bound B of the interval, we increase
the value of dac data by c each time. When the value
of dac data is greater than 2
n
c, we set the value
of dac data as c. The above control process makes
the value of SUM stable in the interval [A,B], thereby
avoiding saturation of the homodyne detector.
3 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP &
RESULT
We build an all-in-fiber setup with off-the-shelves de-
vices according to the scheme shown in Figure. 1.
The system includes three main parts: the balance
control module, entropy source and an electronic cir-
cuit for measurement, calculation and randomness ex-
traction.
The entropy source consists of a 1550 nm dis-
tributed feedback laser (NKT Basic E15, line width
100 Hz) whose output beam is divided into two beams
by BS
1
(η
ab
1
= 3.80dB, η
ab
2
= 3.56dB). The upper
arm is modulated by a phase modulator (EOSPACE,
insertion loss η
pm
= 3.24dB, V
π
= 1.240V ). The two
output signals are coupled into BS
2
(η
c
1
d
1
= 3.68dB,
η
c
1
d
2
= 3.82dB, η
c
2
d
1
= 3.76dB, η
c
2
d
2
= 3.60dB). To
suppress the deviation of the output signal by the ho-
modyne detector, a feedback control voltage will be
loaded on the PM. The following DC coupling ho-
modyne detector (Newport, 1817-FC, measurement
bandwidth 80 MHz, convertion gain of PD
1
5.55 ×
10
4
V /W , convertion gain of PD
2
5.42 × 10
4
V /W )
will convert the input optical signal into electrical
signal. The ADC card (ADS5463, sampling fre-
quency set as 80 MHz, sampling precision 12 bits
and input voltage range 1 VPP) samples the analog
signal and quantize it into digital value. The field
programmable gate array (FPGA, KC705 evaluation
Experimental Implementation of Bias-free Quantum Random Number Generator based on Vacuum Fluctuation
279
board) will sum the sampled N = 1000 variables and
compare the value of sum, SUM, with the preset in-
terval [2043000,2053000]. The result of compari-
son will affect the change in dac data, which will be
converted to the phase compensation voltage through
digital-to-analog card (DAC, AD9736, sampling pre-
cision 14 bits and output voltage range 2.480 VPP)
at a speed of 80 KHz when the laser power is set
to 5 mW . In our experiment, the adjustment step of
dac data is set as 5.
The practical discontinuous phase compensation
voltage can not meet the requirement of accurate com-
pensation, which results to the compensated signal re-
main a certain bias. To solve this problem, a subtrac-
tion operation between these 1000 variables and their
mean will also be implemented on FPGA. The result
of subtraction is used to randomness estimation and
extraction.
Classical noise introduced by the imperfect de-
vices in the practical system will be controlled by the
eavesdropper, Eve, which will result to the informa-
tion leakage of random numbers, thereby damage the
security of the whole system (Bouda et al., 2012). To
eliminate the effects of the electrical noise, statistical
parameter min-entropy was proposed to quantize the
extractable randomness (Ma et al., 2013) and a the-
oretical security proved randomness extractor will be
utilized. For the random number generator based on
the measurement of the vacuum noise, the outcome
of practical measurement M and the noise data E can
be obtained when the LO is turned on and turned off
separately. M is a combination of the measurement
result of quantum noise Q and classical noise E. Q
and E are assumed to be independent and they both
obey Gaussian distribution (Haw et al., 2015). So the
min-entropy of the measurement outcome M condi-
tioned on the existing classical noise E can be given
by
H
min
(M|E) = log
2
max
eE
max
mM
P
M|E
(m|e)
= log
2
2π
σ
2
M
σ
2
E

1
/
2
= log
2
2πσ
2
Q
1
/
2
.
(7)
When the LO power is set to 5 mW , the mea-
sured voltage variance of the raw data σ
2
M
is calcu-
lated as 1.86 × 10
5
. The measured voltage variance
of the raw data σ
2
E
is calculated as 166.09 when the
LO power is set to 0 mW . Thus the H
min
(M|E) can
be calculated as 10.08 bits per sample or 0.84 bits per
raw data bit, which means that 84.0% random bits
can be generated from each sample. The final ran-
dom number output rate will reach 640 Mbps after
a real-time randomness extraction based on an im-
proved Toeplitz hashing algorithm proposed in Ref.
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
Test item
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1.1
Propotion
0
0.1
0.2
0.3
0.4
0.5
0.6
0.7
0.8
0.9
1
1.1
P-value
Figure 3: Test results of 1000 × 10
6
random bits using
NIST standard statistical test suite. From left to right,
the 15 test items shown on the x-axis are named as Fre-
quency, Block frequency, Cumulative sums, Runs, Longest-
run, Rank, FFT, Non-periodic templates, Overlapping tem-
plates, Universal, Approximate entropy, Random excur-
sions, Random excursions variant, Serial and Linear Com-
plexity, respectively. On the y-axis, the left and right di-
agram shows the passing proportion and P-value of each
tests, separately. The dotted line shown above is the critical
boundary of 0.9805608.
(Zheng et al., 2018b). The size of Toeplitz ma-
trix is set as 1920 × 2400 to achieve a security pa-
rameter of 2
48
. Finally, we test their randomness
through the NIST standard test suite. The NIST test
suite contains 15 statistical tests and each test will
output a statistical p-value. The significant level α
together with β are set as 0.01. 1000 × 10
6
ran-
dom bits are used for testing. The sequences will
be considered to be random when the proportion of
the sequences satisfies p-value > β is in the range of
(1 β 3[(1 β)β/N]
1/2
,1 β + 3[(1 β)β/N]
1/2
)
(Wang et al., 2013; Zheng et al., 2018a).The test re-
sults is shown in Figure. 3.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, a prototype of bias-free and real-time
optical quantum random number generator based on
measuring the vacuum fluctuation of quantum state is
demonstrated. There are two significant merits of our
system favorable for practical applications. First, it
can directly reduce the deviation introduced by the
unbalanced devices and achieve a bias-free output
through compensation and subtraction. Second, the
reduction of deviation makes the homodyne detector
support a greater LO power to help to achieve a higher
min-entropy. Further research can be done by explor-
ing methods to realize accurate compensation and ap-
ply the balance technology to other protocols.
PHOTOPTICS 2019 - 7th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work was supported in part by the Key Program
of National Natural Science Foundation of China
under Grants 61531003, the National Natural Sci-
ence Foundation under Grants 61427813, the Na-
tional Basic Research Program of China under Grants
2014CB340102, China Postdoctoral Science Founda-
tion under Grant 2018M630116, and the Fund of State
Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical
Communications.
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