No Arabic abstract
In quantum cryptography, device-independent (DI) protocols can be certified secure without requiring assumptions about the inner workings of the devices used to perform the protocol. In order to display nonlocality, which is an essential feature in DI protocols, the device must consist of at least two separate components sharing entanglement. This raises a fundamental question: how much entanglement is needed to run such DI protocols? We present a two-device protocol for DI random number generation (DIRNG) which produces approximately $n$ bits of randomness starting from $n$ pairs of arbitrarily weakly entangled qubits. We also consider a variant of the protocol where $m$ singlet states are diluted into $n$ partially entangled states before performing the first protocol, and show that the number $m$ of singlet states need only scale sublinearly with the number $n$ of random bits produced. Operationally, this leads to a DIRNG protocol between distant laboratories that requires only a sublinear amount of quantum communication to prepare the devices.
In a measurement-device-independent or quantum-refereed protocol, a referee can verify whether two parties share entanglement or Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) steering without the need to trust either of the parties or their devices. The need for trusting a party is substituted by a quantum channel between the referee and that party, through which the referee encodes the measurements to be performed on that partys subsystem in a set of nonorthogonal quantum states. In this Letter, an EPR-steering inequality is adapted as a quantum-refereed EPR-steering witness, and the trust-free experimental verification of higher dimensional quantum steering is reported via preparing a class of entangled photonic qutrits. Further, with two measurement settings, we extract $1.106pm0.023$ bits of private randomness per every photon pair from our observed data, which surpasses the one-bit limit for projective measurements performed on qubit systems. Our results advance research on quantum information processing tasks beyond qubits.
Applications of randomness such as private key generation and public randomness beacons require small blocks of certified random bits on demand. Device-independent quantum random number generators can produce such random bits, but existing quantum-proof protocols and loophole-free implementations suffer from high latency, requiring many hours to produce any random bits. We demonstrate device-independent quantum randomness generation from a loophole-free Bell test with a more efficient quantum-proof protocol, obtaining multiple blocks of $512$ bits with an average experiment time of less than $5$ min per block and with a certified error bounded by $2^{-64}approx 5.42times 10^{-20}$.
The intrinsic random nature of quantum physics offers novel tools for the generation of random numbers, a central challenge for a plethora of fields. Bell non-local correlations obtained by measurements on entangled states allow for the generation of bit strings whose randomness is guaranteed in a device-independent manner, i.e. without assumptions on the measurement and state-generation devices. Here, we generate this strong form of certified randomness on a new platform: the so-called instrumental scenario, which is central to the field of causal inference. First, we theoretically show that certified random bits, private against general quantum adversaries, can be extracted exploiting device-independent quantum instrumental-inequality violations. To that end, we adapt techniques previously developed for the Bell scenario. Then, we experimentally implement the corresponding randomness-generation protocol using entangled photons and active feed-forward of information. Moreover, we show that, for low levels of noise, our protocol offers an advantage over the simplest Bell-nonlocality protocol based on the Clauser-Horn-Shimony-Holt inequality.
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 used. Here, we devise a device-independent spot-checking protocol which uses only uniform bits as input. 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), which is 5 orders of magnitude more efficient than our previous work [arXiv:1812.07786]. The experiment ran for 91.0 hours, creating randomness at an average rate of 3606 bits/s with a soundness error bounded by $5.7times 10^{-7}$ in the presence of classical side information. Our system will allow for greater trust in public sources of randomness, such as randomness beacons, and the protocols may one day enable high-quality sources of private randomness as the device footprint shrinks.
Randomness expansion where one generates a longer sequence of random numbers from a short one is viable in quantum mechanics but not allowed classically. Device-independent quantum randomness expansion provides a randomness resource of the highest security level. Here, we report the first experimental realization of device-independent quantum randomness expansion secure against quantum side information established through quantum probability estimation. We generate $5.47times10^8$ quantum-proof random bits while consuming $4.39times10^8$ bits of entropy, expanding our store of randomness by $1.08times10^8$ bits at a latency of about $13.1$ h, with a total soundness error $4.6times10^{-10}$. Device-independent quantum randomness expansion not only enriches our understanding of randomness but also sets a solid base to bring quantum-certifiable random bits into realistic applications.