Physics Commons^™

Testing Quantum Randomness In Single-Photon Polarization Measurements With The Nist Test Suite, David Branning, Matthew Bermudez

Faculty Scholarship

A binary sequence was constructed from 1.7×10⁷ polarization measurements of single photons from a spontaneous parametric downconversion source, under pumping conditions similar to those used in optical quantum cryptography. To search for correlations in the polarization measurement outcomes, we subjected the sequence to a suite of tests developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for the assessment of algorithmic random-number generators. The bias of the sequence was low enough to allow all fifteen tests to be applied directly to the polarization outcomes without using any numerical unbiasing procedures. No statistically significant deviations from randomness were observed, …