As reported by Engadget on Monday, March 1, 2021.
Schematic. (Image credit: Berry Seal Tende/Wikimedia/CC BY-SA 3.0)
An international team of scientists has developed a laser that can generate 254 trillion random numbers per second, more than a hundred times faster than a calculator-based random number generator (RNG).
Although random number generation has existed for thousands of years, it has become increasingly important in computing because it forms the basis of cryptography. With more devices online than ever before, the need for faster encryption that can stop bad actors is becoming increasingly important. To show the widespread need for RNGs in modern technology, Google demonstrated the clear advantages of a 53-qubit quantum calculator using the RNG problem.
This is why the new system can be a game changer: it can generate 250 TB of random bits per second. In fact, it’s so fast that the team behind it had trouble recording its output using a high-speed camera. The researchers say their system outperforms physical random number generators both in speed and through its ability to create many streams of bits at once. The results were published in the journal Science.
According to Science News, the new invention utilizes tiny lasers only a millimeter long that reflect light between mirrors located at the ends of an hourglass-shaped cavity before leaving the device. Unlike previous laser-based systems, the new process can amplify many optical modes simultaneously.
These interfere with each other to produce rapid intensity fluctuations, which the team recorded using a camera that measured light intensity at 254 points in the beam about every trillionth of a second. However, the speed of the laser output data meant that the camera could only track it for a few nanoseconds before it ran out of storage space and the data could be uploaded to a calculator.
The random generator system was developed jointly by researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, Yale University and Trinity College Dublin, and was built at NTU. For the future of the system, the team’s goal is to make it ready for practical use by integrating the laser into a compact chip. This will allow the random numbers it generates to be fed directly into a calculator.
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