Frequency noise characteristics of a diode laser and its application to physical random number generation
Shinya Maehara, Kohei Kawakami, Hideaki Arai, Kenji Nakano, Kohei Doi, Takashi G. Sato, Yasuo Ohdaira, Shuichi Sakamoto, Masashi Ohkawa · Optical Engineering · 2013
We describe a method of generating physical random numbers by means of a diode laser that has an extremely wide-band frequency-noise profile. Fluctuations in the laser frequency affect the intensity of the light transmitted through the optical frequency discriminator, detected thereafter as random fluctuations. This allows us to simultaneously generate 8 random bit streams, due to the parallel processing of 8-digit binary numbers sampled by an 8-bit analog-to-digital converter. Finally, we generated physical random numbers at a rate of 3 Gbit/s, by combining one data stream with another stream that is delayed by 2 ms, by exclusive-OR.