Extracting More Quantum Randomness With Non-Uniform Quantization

Abstract

Random numbers generated via quantum process is indeterministic, which are of essential to the cryptographic communication and the large-scale computer modeling. However, in realistic scenarios, classical noises can inevitably contaminate the raw sequences of a quantum randomness number generator (QRNG), and then compromise the security of the QRNG. Min-entropy is a useful approach that can quantify the randomness independent of side-information. To enhance the extractable randomness of the raw sequences arising from the QRNG, we propose a new method which exploits non-uniform quantization methods instead of uniform sampling methods and effectively enhances the extractable randomness from the QRNG at a high quantum-to-classical-noise ratio (QCNR). Given a QCNR as 50 dB and a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC), the worst-case conditional min-entropy of the non-uniform quantization scheme is improved by nearly 11% compared with that of the uniform sampling scheme.

Keywords

• Quantum random-number generation
• Min-entropy