Experimental implementation of vacuum-based quantum random number generator for quantum communication and cryptography protocols

Quantum random number generators represent one of the most promising techniques for producing truly and unique random numbers, essential in many applications such as quantum communication and cryptography protocols. In this work, we report an experimental implementation of vacuum-based quantum random number generator. By measuring the quantum fluctuations of the radiation ground state, a mixture of a perfectly Gaussian distributed random signal—originating from the intrinsic randomness in the quantum measurement— and an undesired classical electronic noise is obtained. Using an adequate post-processing, the undesired classical contribution of the electronic noise is removed to produce final, quasi-uniformly distributed random bit sequences. The high-quality character of the generated random bits is confirmed by applying the statistical tests of the NIST SP 800-22 test battery.