Device-independent Randomness Expansion with Entangled Photons

TL;DR

This paper presents a device-independent randomness expansion protocol using entangled photons, achieving a 24% increase in certified randomness over input bits with high speed and low error, enhancing trust in public and private randomness sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spot-checking protocol that efficiently expands randomness without additional biased bits, demonstrated through a photonic loophole-free Bell test.

Findings

Produced 24% more randomness than input bits

Achieved an average rate of 3606 bits/sec

Bounded soundness error at 5.7×10⁻⁷

Abstract

With the growing availability of experimental loophole-free Bell tests, it has become possible to implement a new class of device-independent random number generators whose output can be certified to be uniformly random without requiring a detailed model of the quantum devices used. However, all of these experiments require many input bits in order to certify a small number of output bits, and it is an outstanding challenge to develop a system that generates more randomness than is consumed. Here, we devise a device-independent spot-checking protocol that consumes only uniform bits without requiring any additional bits with a specific bias. Implemented with a photonic loophole-free Bell test, we can produce 24% more certified output bits (1,181,264,237) than consumed input bits (953,301,640). The experiment ran for 91.0 hours, creating randomness at an average rate of 3606 bits/s with a soundness error bounded by $5.7\times 10^{-7}$ in the presence of classical side information. Our system will allow for greater trust in public sources of randomness, such as randomness beacons, and may one day enable high-quality private sources of randomness as the device footprint shrinks.