On the randomness of time ordered quantum measurements

Abstract

A new method for efficient, high-quality randomness extraction is presented. The method relies on quantum processes such as the emission of single photons and their subsequent detection, where each detection event has an associated detection time. By establishing a list of time differences between a fixed number of events, a unique order can be established.

We note that, by utilising the number of ways to order the resulting list of time differences between the quantum events, the efficiency can be increased many-fold compared to current methods. The method delivers fundamentally uniform randomness and therefore, in principle, does not need debiasing.